Six am the Spanish couple’s phone alarm sounds. ‘No rest for the wicked’ I think on waking. In some past life I must have been a right b@#$% for in this one I have been an angel, is the lie I like to tell myself. After the simple pilgrims breakfast the sun is yet to…
We are woken at 4:00 am by the soothing strains of some German sounding rap music playing as an alarm on someone’s mobile phone. Either the owner of the phone is using the snooze feature or is in the shower block, for the music turns off after a while and then blares another four times…
Both Pam and my sleep is troubled. I seem to awake nearly every half hour and have to listen to the harmony of the wind section playing in each bed for ages to get back to sleep. The irony is that each time I do Pam prods me to stop snoring. The pilgrim…
Camino Day 1 SJPDP – Orisson Assumptions based on previous experience can be found wanting with changes in circumstance. Based on Pam’s previous walking prowess walking the eight point five kilometers from St Jean Pied de Port to the Albergues Orisson will take a couple of hours. The Albergues Orission is small, having only 18…
The Way of St James This is the beginning of our pilgrimage from St Jean Pied de Port at the foot of the Pyrenees in France following the ancient route to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, North West Spain. The Camino Frances, which is the route we are following, is over 800km in total. We…
St Jean Pied de Port We started our day in this glorious part of the world by heading straight to the post office. Me, to post 3kg of stuff to Santiago de Compostela. I hadn’t even taken a single step on the Camino yet but the reality of our journey looking at the size of…
Our last full day in Paris commences with us being good Aussies proud to fulfil our civic duty. Voting at an embassy is a different experience however the forms are the same as it ever was. The experience is simple yet bizarre in some indefinable manner. Pam has been to Paris twice before this trip,…
Following the andtheywalked ethos, don’t walk the same path twice, we make our way to climb the Arc de Triomphe. Today is cloudy but no rain. We have timed our run to perfection, the queue at the ticket office begins to move as we attach ourselves to its tail end. Mission accomplished at last. I…
We awake to the sound of steady rain. I realise as we leave the hotel that I have not worn a raincoat since primary school and that I had completely overlooked the loss of peripheral vision once you lift the hood onto your head. The indignant beep of a horn on the very first zebra…
The consensus is that I am too verbose, so we are writing this together in the hope of compression. We have been tired and there has been so much to do we have had little time to update. We are now sitting in the outdoor section of the Refuge Albergue Orisson after having walked the…
andtheywalked.com 