So, this is it then. Our last day. People got up at 5 this morning and started to make noise in the dormitory. This only night in an albergue belonging to the Camino Frances only strengthened our dislike for the whole Frances world; People threw away food at dinner yesterday night, people were loudly packing their bags and talking before 6 am in the morning. They would have switched on the light too if they had found it. It all seemed much less social and more touristy than on the Primitivo, apart from being simply much more crowded. Having only 10 km left, we did the exact opposite and stood…

As I had been up for most of the night because my body didn’t cope with dinner very successfully, standing up this morning was very hard. Johanna and Ben had gone to bed at 3 so at least they were tired too. It is normal that Johanna and I don’t talk in the morning until the third kilometre or so, but today we just exchanged one grumpy look without even saying good morning. We finally left at 8 and it was raining outside. The rain got harder during the first half hour and we were soaking wet after about 20 minutes. Without actively planning to do so, we started a…

We set off relatively late around 7:30 and started walking in the foggy rain mainly along roads with only small pieces through forests. Johanna still didn’t have all her strength back and at the same time my body worked quite well, so for the first time I was ahead of her. Tom soon caught up to us and went ahead. We found him again after 8 km when we sat down for breakfast on a wet terrasse of an ugly bar in an ugly village. Mitch and Ben also arrived and we walked on together but without Tom who had left a little earlier.Today’s stage was definitely the ugliest stage…

We had met up to start walking together at 9 but when we got down, half of the group had already left because they thought we had left. Mitch and Ben were still waiting however, and Andres and Sabine who had slept outside also joined us.We started walking at 9:30, later than ever before and followed the green arrows through some woods and fields for about 2 hours. Despite a certain tiredness, we kept ourselves entertained with a very funny story-making game and settled for breakfast at 11:30 on a grassy field under some trees, where we sat mostly in silence with some of us sleeping and relaxing in the…

Due to the extreme shakeyness of the beds that made me feel like I was on a small boat out on the ocean, and the super bright streetlights outside exactly on the hight of our beds, the night was not really as restoring as it should have been. We left at 7 anyway and it was already hot outside. Today we took a D-tour back towards the Camino del Norte to avoid a few more nights on the Camino francés which is terribly crowded so close to Santiago and summer. Walking on the Frances right now means having to reserve all your albergues or get there before 12 and stand…

If I had to describe today in one adjective, it would be HOT. We left extra early before 7 this morning to escape the heat at least a little but it was already super warm even at that time and I changed into the short clothes in the middle of the first hill. We crossed the back of one hill and descended on the other side; the rest of the day would be much flatter than the profiles of the last days.We tried to make time pass faster with the old recipe of solving black stories and it worked and we felt like we were walking pretty fast. At some…

After 6 hours of sleep – one hour too little – we took off as usual. The altitude profile of today’s stage hadn’t looked that bad yesterday but when I checked it again this morning, it still had 800 m of elevation gain and loss. We thought we were super tough now and we would do it without any problems because we had done so much more in the past days, but we didn’t foresee the extreme steepness of those hills nor the weather. It got warm after the first 100 m of elevation and hotter after that. The sky was bright blue without any clouds, no wind, all the…

Sun rose at 6:30 and it stayed on the sky surrounded by blue sky all day. We had early-rising roommates, extremely shaky beds and completely insane cows in front of our window today, so we left early at 10 past 7. Apart from the perfect blue sky, the day welcomed us with a huge mountain. It hadn’t looked that hard on the altitude profile, but it was. Complaining started earlier than ever before as we went up and up towards the highest peak visible in the surrounding landscape. We didn’t like it. However, the view on the surrounding mountains and the clouds hanging in the valleys were very nice. On…

It is fascinating that I have been inventing new words every day for 23 days now to express basically the same thing: we walked. Well, today we walked again. We walked just a little more than 20 km today, but with 1200 m of elevation gain and 1300 m of elevation loss. As a morning warmup, we climbed the closest mountain peak up to the altitude of some wind mills. After that, the longest denscent of the Camino began. About 800 m straight downhill through very nice forest landscape and incredible views on the huge reservoir of Salime. We settled down for breakfast on one of the nice schistose rocks…

We left the albergue at the usual time, prepared for a rainy day and one of our hardest stages on the whole Camino. It was just lightly drizzeling and the clouds were still above us when we set off. The Camino took us on beautiful paths through forests along a small mountain river. It was not too steep at first and even descended a few times. Always following the course of the river, we almost didn’t notice how we gained hight. After about 3 km we reached the altitude of the clouds and continued in thick, wet fog, with sometimes more, sometimes less rain. The profile of the stage had…