Date: 16 June 2025
Walking Day: 1
Route: Saint Jean Pied De Port to Roncesvalles - upon er the Pyrenees Mountain!
Distance Walked Today: X miles
Total Distance So Far: X miles
Highlights of the Day:
(voice to text I will correct later making this blog along. These will be voice text cleaned up a little with Chat GPT)
Too many highlights for the day.
Leo and I both wrote some things down at the end that I’ll incorporate later, but this was an incredible day. It was four to five to six times harder than I thought it would be.
We had an issue where the albergue didn’t have breakfast—it was closed—so I started without enough calories. I bonked in the first third of the day, and it really had me wondering if I was going to be able to do this trek.
This path is steep uphill—and I mean steep—and not just for a short bit. It doesn’t flatten out much. It’s steep for a mile, two miles, then maybe something barely flat… and then it climbs again. Eventually, you see clouds. Then you walk into the cloud—which is wonderful. Then through that cloud, and suddenly you’re hit with an incredible view. Then another cloud. Then past the treeline, where there are no more trees because the altitude is so high. And still you keep climbing.
But all the while, you’re surprised by extraordinary sights—wild horses with bells, sheep with bells, goats with bells, cattle with bells, etc., etc. It was incredibly cool. The Pyrenees might be the only place that actually has enough cowbell.
Anyway, after I bonked and had to lay down and eat what food we had, I got a second wind. We stopped at this lunch place called Orrison—maybe sort of halfway up the hill? Hard to tell now, three days in—but that lunch was amazing. It really gave us energy to keep going. We started to lose steam again toward the end, but it was really great that Leo and I had our weak spots at different times, while the other was feeling strong.
All the way up, we had short and long conversations with people from all over the world—Japan, Britain, Croatia, Italy. Such fantastic people. We even met a retired Zen Buddhist monk.
We versed big open fields with incredible views uphill. Forested paths, both steep uphill and steep downhill, Rocky Craigie landscapes with fog that look like something out of an incredible video game, overcast, Misty, sky, Misty, cloudsthen break into full on sunshine on the sunny side of the mountain, we were under clouds we were over clouds. We were in clouds, some Road some town. It was just a little bit of everything in one day. Thinking back on it after two other days traveling that day had more variety than these other two and I would not call them simple.
No sketching, actually no sketching the first 3 days. That will
Come as we get out day start and finish down better and aren’t walking into town dead on our feet
space for leo =
Photos / Sketches:
