Somebody heard a rumour that the Moody Blues were touring along the Camino de Santiago again, and I’m here to say the rumour is categorically true – although with Brian May stepping in to cover for John Lodge 😎.
Also, given we’re ten days in already, it feels like an update of the first week is long overdue.
The first week has seen us walking from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port to Los Arcos, clocking up 138km in the process (roughly 185,000 steps).
Quite how we managed to go from SJPDP to Roncesvalles in one day back in 2024, none of us can fathom – just the walk to Orisson almost broke us this year. Perhaps we had the advantage in 2024 of not knowing what lay ahead 😅.
After managing to find the fabled food truck (one time from a sample size of three!), we hit the top and then took the forest route down to Roncesvalles – guaranteed to bugger the knees within the first ten minutes with the lovely steep downhill parts.
Rather than staying in Roncesvalles, we pushed on another hour or so to Espinal in favour of a shorter walk the following day.
After the food truck at Alto de Erro with its “magic spell” underwear box, it was downhill to Zubiri. The razor-sharp upright rocks have all been smoothed out and/or covered over, so the going is a lot less treacherous than it was in 2024 and 2025.
Calling at Bar Valentin for the usual txistorra feast (🤤), we got a private room overlooking the river and “bridge of rabies”… so had the lovely sound of running water to sleep to.
The journey from Zubiri to Pamplona, Puente la Reina, Estella, and Los Arcos was fairly uneventful. Most of it was spent trying to take in all the things we’d forgotten about the first week of our 2024 journey.
We had a repeat of eating fresh things growing from trees and in fields (peas, plums, cherries, and garlic flowers), and – while not sampling them – also spotted lots of fennel, figs, almonds, walnuts, quince, olives, and loquats.
We’re a few days into week two at the moment, enjoying a rest day in Logroño (the capital of La Rioja) before a long shlep in the heat. More on that in another post 😎.
