We woke up in the mountain with a beautiful sunrise over the villages and grassy fields laying under a cover of morning fog beneath us.Breakfast was given in the big common room for everyone at 7 and we set off at 8, still continuing our way together with Mitch and Ben after we had said goodbye to grandpa Ernesto.We walked on country roads for a while and crossed different fields until getting to the coastline again.Right before seeing the sea, we saw a different curious scene: a little village was preparting for the cow beauty contest. very handsome back-and-white cows in different sized were washed, styled, hairsprayed and combed, microphones…

In order to walk only 22 km today instead of 27, we cheated a little and took a bus through Laredo to the other end of the 5km-long beach. We got there at 8:15 and had time to have a nice sunrise-breakfast at the beach while more and more pilgrims arrived and sat down waiting for the first boat to Santoña.This mini-ferry took us some 200 m across the bay to the city opposite – Santoña. We crossed it and followed the descriptions in our book, as there were many alternative ways today and we wanted to do the shortest and nicest. While doing so, we had a happy reunion…

Noone expected it, but as we hadn’t put an alarm clock for this morning we literally woke up at 11:30. I guess our bodies really needed some sleep. The rest of the day was not as quiet and relaxing as my feet would have liked it but still quite nice. After breakfast and organizing (at the time we normally have walked around 15 k and are thinking about our lunch break), we went to the beach and walked about 5 km in the sand.Aterwards, we split up and I went to cross the Laredo tunnel to a viewpoint which had a view very similar to what we see all the…

Today started off much better than yesterday, at 7 o’clock and with pretty decent weather. After a few meters outside the village we entered a coastal path with beautiful views over the sea and coastline. We followed this path -unfortunately asphalt but very nice nevertheless – until Ontón, another small village at the seaside.There, we had to change to a national road which was thankfully not very frequented but still very ennoying and stopped for breakfast on a stormy-sunny terrace next to the road after our first 7 km.After breakfast, a light rain started to fall while big black clouds steadily moved over our heads. Rain stopped after a few…

I guess you wouldn’t be able to appreciate the better days if there weren’t shit days like today. Yesterday’s events and confusion affected our plans for today and instead of skipping the next stage after Bilbao like we had planned to do from the beginning, we walked. We left Bilbao at 8 and took the short and “nicer” version of the stage along the river. After passing through the nice city center, including the Guggenheim, we had 11 km of extremely ugly industrial cityscape that took us to Portugalete. We though of taking a bus various times but carried on in the end. In Portugalete, we crossed the river with…

We are getting better! (In some things at least..). This morning, I was literally the first person at breakfast and Johanna had everything packed up when she arrived 10 minutes later. We weren’t the first ones to leave but still left around 8 which is pretty good. For many kilometers we were completely alone as we left Gernika and climbed a steep mountain while the sun rose with us, desolving the last bits of morning fog hanging over the village. We walked an extra kilometre when we decided to take the normal Camino despite a big sign that warned about forest work and then turned around when we heard the…