Day 5 already! I made breakfast while watching the sun struggle through the mists as it rose and before smacking us with its heat. THis had been a particularly hot summer in Spain, and many regions had been affected by wildfires. This was a big concern for me as I prepared to take time off work for this trip, but there wasn’t anything that I could do besides look up websites that tracked fires and tried my best to understand them with no knowledge of spanish.
Matti and I left at the same time that morning, rounding the hill beside the hunting lodge and climbing to the top. And what a view we got! Turning around, you could see the green adn brown hills jutting out from a sea of fog between the peaks, filling the valleys like nothing I had ever seen before. I got one of my favourite photos of the trip here, and it was a great start to the day.
As we hiked, Matti and I talked, or I should more accurately say, I talked, and got to know each other a bit. He’s also an engineer, loves reading, and was also vegan! So many similarities right off the bat. We hiked past oodles of sheep, met some horses, and continued on to some sort of nature reserve where we found tunnels from a defence network that had been built to seperate Spain from France.
As we descended, we reached a cafe that would be our lunch stop for the day and I got to try tortilla con patatas for the first time! Little did I know that this would become one of my favourite meals on the trip, and the tortilla I’d find for the next 5 weeks was never as good without the patatas. Paired with a coca cola and a piece of bread on a hot day, you couldn’t go wrong. We lounged here for a while, and ate with our friend Julia when she caught up to us.
We had a steep climb after this, and I remember getting to the top and seeing nothing but… shit! I nicknamed the place “shit moutnain” because the sheep had pooped all over the place that it was impossible to find grass to step on for a stretch there! But after that we had great views along the ridges before descending into quite a lush forest and onto a service road that was packed to the brim with cows. We were just outside of a small town, and decided to stay here with some fresh water coming down from the hill rather than trying to find somewhere past the town. We weren’t in a very secluded spot, so we had lots of visitors and cows pass us that evening, but it was a welcome break after 22 kilometers of walking.
