Luggage forwarding can be done at the post office, but it is MUCH cheaper to send things from within Spain. We found this out the SECOND time we sent things forward.

The road leads you to Roncesvalles, where most Spanish people begin their trek, and the site of the first official Pilgrim’s mass. Go to it, but first, make a reservation for dinner (you will need to get into the habit of checking to see if one is needed wherever you stay). You could be waiting a long time to eat otherwise.

Zubiri’s auberge is municipal and small. It was our first taste of what would become an uncomfortable and unfortunate consequence of the Camino’s intense popularity: the bed race. Simply put, there are no longer sufficient spaces to accomodate the huge numer of walkers. The mental stress of finding a bed at the end of the day is not something to be taken lightly. Many of the hikers at this stage put a quick end to their journey. This, above any other consideration, should be seriously borne.

On day three, the physical chore of doing the same thing another ten times over occupied me rather relentlessly – until we entered the gates of fabulous Pamplona! Sturck dumb by its beauty and utterly enchanted by its EXCELLENT municipal auberge, Pamplona is when we decided, for better or for worse, we were finishing this hike. Without skipping steps. No matter what it took. (It would take a lot).

It was also in Pamplona that routine started taking shape; get a bed, take a shower, wash the socks, tend the feet, find Kimu some candy… Rinse. Repeat.

Check out the letter I sent to Scott this day.

Puenta de la Reina is significant for another kind of meeting: the Camino Aragones, the southern route, joins Santiago at this point. Which once again makes bedspace very hard to find. It also attracts a new pilgrim nemesis; the tour groups.

For a lot of people, joining a chauffered tour is as much pilgrim suffering they can cope with. And while generally, these people stay at finer establishments than your local gym floor, they still compete for the unique entitlements all pilgrims need. Notably, the daily passport stamps you need to collect to make you entitled for the certificate de compostella when you arrive in Santiago.

The stamps – nothing special, really – simply prove that you have been to a town, and are usually had at the auberge when you register. So it was after a 28 kilometer day, dead on my feet, that a tour group SWARMED ME, crushing me against the buttress of the auberge so that they could GET THEIR STAMP before getting back on the bus for their luxury hotel, even though I was in the process of getting a bed so that I could REST for the first time in 8 hours, and really just wanted to get out of the way. It took Darcy barking at them to get them to comply.

In Estella, we were the last two to get beds, and they were in a stairwell. Actually, this suited me fine. I had an uncanny ability to pick beds next to the loudest snorer in the room. The hallway offered one night of respite. Bring earplugs even if you sleep like a log.

In Los Arcos, a week after setting out, the bed race finally proved to be too great for a huge number of people. Many sped ahead a few days by bus, trying to get past the massive cohort that set out at the end of April. Others still opted to do only the last 100 kms and seek out a beach somewhere south. It was a difficult scene to watch so many pilgrims being turned away from the auberge we ourselves had to race to.

It should come as no surprise that the people most unlikely to get beds – the hurt and elderly – are also the ones who needed them most. Being witness to this discouraged us greatly.

At this point, we’ve joined forces with Tim, an American artist from London and Luigi, an Italian priest from Malawi. The two of them had a rare chemistry that made them hilarious to witness, and they walked a good pace. They also enjoyed a good coffee, and I owe my new dependency mostly to them.

The long and the short of it is that our too heavy bags finally resulted in injury, and arriving after 30 long kilometers in rainy Najera, it was tears and fears that overcame us. We couldn’t keep going like this.

And so. After much reflection, we decided that the weight must be reduced. Principally, this involved sending off our sleeping bags – heavy, large and not at all designed for this sort of thing. We would figure out bedding somehow. An angel at the auberge helped us put the package together, but the problem of waiting for the post office to open the following day (thereby losing all chances of finding a bed) meant that we had to reserve a hotel – an extraordinary expense compared to the costs we had otherwise anticipated for the Camino.

There was little other choice.