Wed. May 11 San Sebastian

I started this morning with a bubble bath and a hot tea, definitely not a Camino experience but such a welcomed one. Today we started off at the wonderfully decadent hour of 10:00am and walked along the boardwalk to the Puerto (Port) and the Parte Viejo (the old town). Every few steps there was a tapas taberna with an amazing array of Pintxo (Basque tapas) and every few steps we stopped at one of them and Dayton indulged. By early afternoon we had visited five different restaurants for the tapas, ice cream and drinks and then settled down for a lovely long rest at one of the boardwalk restaurants. We may have been on a Camino break but we still walked for four or five hours although this time it was oh so slowly and without packs.

After our two hour lunch break, we walked to the west end of the beach and took the Funicular up to the lookouts on a castle-topped cliff. The views of the beaches, the city and the ocean were as incredible as promised and we could get a perfect sense of the ruggedness of this northern coast and we immediately resolved to never put the Camino del Norte on our bucket list. It is way too difficult and from what we've heard the weather on the Camino del Norte is very inclement, not at all the sunny skies we've been enjoying.

Tomorrow moring it's a bus back to Pamplona and an 18km walk to Uterga. I'm offering prayers to Sainte Rita, the patron saint of hopeless and desperate causes to alleviate my planatar fasciitis/tendinitis/pain in the foot/whatever. There might be a cab in my near future.