nbjtours

Day One

Santiago de Compostella- Sarria

80 miles 8268 ft climbed.

In devising the route to Le Puy from Santiago I have not been religious ( pun intended) in following the actual Camino path but we do follow it more often than not.

Having our Camino passports also means that we explore some of the towns we pass through a bit more thoroughly in search of the church so we can get our credencial stamped. We did manage five today.

Today was so great it is difficult to choose an over riding memory. Was it the number of pilgrims walking in the opposite direction, the endless hills and descents or the superb landscapes full of the most wonderful wild flowers.

Leaving our campsite early at 8.30 to tackle a hilly day little did we realise what a tough day it would turn out to be. We arrived at our new campsite site in Sarria just after 7 in the evening having covered only 80 miles!!

Santiago set us up immediately with a super steep hill at over 10% running past the pilgrim hostel. The road was full of pilgrims and got us used to running opposite everyone on their way to Santiago. Most were very polite with an ‘Ola’ or ‘Bon Camino’. We were also amazed at the number of Japanese pilgrims.

In addition to the highlights above we often ran off bigger roads through small villages which were little more than a farm plus a few houses all tightly packed on the road which was often concrete. The smell was usually the familiar Eau de Hadlow cow manure! The only thing we had to watch out for were giant milk tankers that somehow got out to these farms tucked out of the way. How they managed to navigate the narrow villages we are not sure.

Spanish infrastructure is second to none and we spent much of the day crisscrossing the building of a new motorway which bulldozed and viaducted its way over and through the lumpy countryside. We could have saved a lot of climbing if we had sneaked on and used it!

As the terrain was so lumpy and we had to stop so often to take photos Nigel had to reposition the camper as we took three hours to cover less than 30 miles. The belated coffee stop was of course overlooking the motorway under construction!

Our slow progress meant that we decided early on that today was a three stopper so lunch which was taken at almost 3 pm was on the Camino route where Nigel and Monica could have set up a cafe and earned a fortune whilst waiting for the tardy cyclists!

Although we had only 30 miles to go Tired legs meant two 15 mile segments, where luckily the first had a six mile downhill stretch on super smooth tarmac which we enjoyed to the full, running at over 40 mph for some time. It did bring our average up to over 10 mph !!

Chris sensibly decided to save his legs at this stop and left Nick, Dom and Neil ( hanging on ) to cycle the last 17 miles. The last five of the 32 categorised climbs were not especially long but they all had super steep ramps usually on poor gravelly roads over 10% draining the last bit of energy. Chris had made a good choice.

On the last tricky descent on a poor road into Sarria Dom and I came across Nick in the middle of the road chatting away to a Colombian cyclist in training to do a few of the stages of the Vuelta

Arriving so late we had but time for a quick shower before pork chops tatoes and coleslaw was ready. This evening we were joined by Susana from Alicante who was bravely riding her 125 up from there and doing the Camino. As ever this allowed Nick to demonstrate his Spanish although Susana understood English pretty well as do most young people in Europe.

We took more photos of fantastic sights than you could imagine and saw more different species of wild flower than ever before so I will hope to put a flora and fauna page together later on the trip. But the fields of yellow and purple or the cushions of pink saxifrage along the edge of the roads were just wonderful.

Tomorrow sees the Queen stage of the tour with two big climbs book ending the day. Chris has already said he will just do the first. I will decide depending how tired I am during the day. Dom and Nick just say bring it on ! The weather is due to warm up further tomorrow hitting 30 plus so hydration will be key. Stay tuned for another instalment to see how we get on