Thursday, May 28, 2015

Day 10: to Santander (31k)

This has been the iconic camino day. Yet it did not start as such. Way too much was drunk by all last night, leading to, among other shenanigans, me getting into a huge row about hurling, not something I know or care anything about, and an unlikely topic for my drunken belligerence. Lessons learnt (for now). 

Having spent much of the night awake and hungover I was relieved when day dawned, even though the first act of the day was sending Niall off on the bus to Bilbao (so hungover he nearly missed his flight and had to run across the airport after delaying the flight). Actually the first act of the day was dropping my towel out of the window and having to use walking sticks to pick it up off the roof of the restaurant below... Patrick also decided he was not getting up at all and will meet us in a day or two. So just four set off into the morning which was dawning bright and hot...

The first 20k or so was fast, on flat back roads that looked a lot like Camino Frances territory.  Absolutely lovely. The afternoon was the complete treat however. For a very slow but perfect 10k we walked the most glorious coast path with turquoise sea, white sand beaches, and dramatic cliffs all around, surf schools below and also stopped for an enormous and enormously delicious ice cream. Finally Santander arose across the bay and we walked a couple of k of stunning beach to Somo, had a quick swim etc and then took the ferry across to the city. Where we are -finally - back in a real albergue with all the feet, crampedness, falling down shower curtains and kindly geriatric hospitaleros that that implies.

It's late and I'm tired and can't do full justice to how spectacular it all was. But in summary, a gorgeous invigorating day.



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