A very early start before 6am, with quite a few aches after spending a very cold night on the corridor outside the toilet in an old hospital building.
We said our goodbyes to the lovely Germans who had the pleasure of sharing our sleeping space and set on our way to Zubiri.
As we made our way down a muddy track out of Roncevalles Isabel managed to slip and twist her ankle, Doctor Vanessa was straight onto it, bangaged up and we were off again.. not the best start, but determined to keep going!We started to climb down the mountain we found ourselves in the muddiest of muddy fields, beyond anything we´d ever been through in Ireland! We had thick heavy mud caked about 2 inches thick all around our shoes.. this was before we reached the ´slushy mud´as we decided to call it which really was quite exciting.
Think very steep rocky path, going downwards, and several inches of runny runny mud flowing down it! We laughed our way through it as mud splattered up the backs of our legs and up around our ankles.. our pretty North Face shoes were no longer looking quite so pretty!
On we trundled through some small towns and then up a never ending hill... decided to take the road route which was slightly longer but better ground for a dodgy ankle, however we found ourselves climbing on a loopy road up this hill for an additional 2 kilometers. Next time the calculations will certainly be done better!
We followed another quite steep decent into a small town called Zubiri, arriving about 3.30pm. To our absolute delight we found that all the hostels were full, as was the hotel, and we were being faced with a further 6 hilly kilometers before the next town, Larrasona which we did not feel like one bit.
After some grovelling and a bit of luck we were kindly allowed sleep in a big sports hall behind the main hostel, with its extremely high ceiling the echoing of all the snoring was less than entertaining but wrapped up in all our clothes a good nights sleep was had otherwise!
