Apr 7th, 2019

Author: donich_admin

Akerreta

Today was the longest day of the Camino – 27km. We got off early after another rather indifferent breakfast – the one meal the Spaniards don’t do well.

The first part of the walk was through rolling woodlands – again, very reminisent of Argyll and very pleasant.

As we got to lunchtime though, the path started to get very rough with unusual rock ridges protruding through it like rough and slippy stairs.

This did not make for enjoyable walking – J particularly didn’t like it. We managed to get over that bit and carried on to Zuibir where most people were finishing the stage for the day at 21km. But the holiday company in their wisdom had booked us for a hotel in Akerreta which was a further 7km away. We had a nice sandwich and cervezas, looked at the medieval bridge and set off again.

It was at this point that a semi-disaster struck. We had walked about 5km with a few pauses to rest, when I suddenly realized that my iPhone was no longer in my pocket. Tired as I was I left J to sit by the side of the road and shot back up the Camino about 3km to where I could remember taking the last photo with it. I pinged it with my iWatch all the way back but no luck. So I thought – R can do a “find my iphone” for me – luckily I had taken J’s phone with me – and unluckily he had put no contacts in it! Like most people I don’t memorize numbers – I just keep them in my contacts. What to do? The only number I could remember was my brother N’s landline, so I rang him (in tears at this point) and asked him to ring R. Well the long and the short of it is that (no thanks to Apple Maps) R managed to navigate me back towards it. While we were trying to find it, a nice German lady who I had asked if she had seen the phone earlier tried to help me, but to no avail. She set off down the Camino, and ten minutes later R and I found the iPhone lying on a wall. It must have either slipped out of my pocket when I was having a rest, or I inadvertently put it down there while we were investigating a potential raptor sighting.
As I set off back to walk to where J was, I got a phone call on J’s phone from a German number. When the German lady had walked past J – he had asked her (and I quote) “Have you seen a crazy red-haired woman looking for a phone” – so she offered him her phone to call me. True spirit of the Camino. We staggered on (at this point including the detour for the phone I had walked 30km) and eventually got to the hotel at 7:30pm.
Nice day apart from the phone incident and lovely hotel – an old converted building, with a medieval bread oven in the lounge.

Thanks to R and N for recovering my phone.
Pamplona tomorrow.