Day 1: St. Jean, France to ... Read and Find Out! | Alex Carruthers

Greetings, Western Civilization.  Now, people.  I'm not going to lie to y'all.  I don't want to lie to y'all.  I feel like I owe it to y'all to give you the truth, especially to our loyal subscribers (I think I've solved the problem, but it easily could still exist.  I'm sure that I will get some texts or comments below that will let us know if the problem has been fixed).  But I digress.  I am not going to lie to y'all.  Today was tough.  It was steep, long, and windy.

 If we were to travel from St. Jean, France, to Roncesvalles, Spain, it would have been 24 kilometers, which does not seem like much, but when you take into account the absurd wind that knocked our Camino friend down the Camino a little bit and the fact that we walked over the Pyrenees mountain range where our highest point of elevation was 1,602 meters, it was a tough day's trek.  We walked over an entire mountain range.

 However, we decided not to stop at Roncesvalles, but we walked an extra 3 kilometers to Burguete, Spain (Trivia: What famous, depressed author loves this city?  It's his favorite city in Spain).  But despite being a fan of this author, we decided to go on to the next town, Espinal, Spain (3.6 km from Burguete) since the alburgue we were trying to stay in did not open for another thirty minutes.  So we decided to walk to the Espinal instead of waiting on this alburgue. Was our logic flawed?  One might say that it was flawed, but we had just walked over an entire mountain range.  So that negates our flawed logic.  Hop off us.  So for those at home, we hiked thirty kilometers today.  It was tough, beautiful, and rewarding--easily one of the coolest days of my life.  We finally arrived at Espinal and did some laundry in a sink because that's all they have, and we ordered a beer.

 We deserved that beer.

 After all, we had just walked over an entire mountain range.

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