Barcelona, Bikers, and Windmills

Saturday, September 25th, Day 4 on the Camino – 13.5 miles to Puente La Reina

On our way out of Pamplona, we walked through the University of Navarre, which looks like a relatively new school. Weird though how the campus ends and country begins…kind of like the Lands End Inn in West Ashley.

But I digress…as we walked we struck up a conversation with a young man from Barcelona, whom I mentioned in that last post. He is a pilot, I think, but he looked like a 17-year old computer geek. He was just walking 100 miles on this trip and would eventually finish the whole camino in stages.

Not far out of town, we passed this scene – see the rainbow?


Now look at this – Kathie caught the actual end of the rainbow! The leprechauns must have heard us coming and hidden their pot of gold. Rats!


Several times we passed ridges lined with windmills. I was just fascinated by them. They didn’t seem noisy to me, but then I have hearing aids plugged into both ears so maybe you shouldn’t trust my opinion on this.


Here’s the wrought iron pilgrim monument at Alto del Perdon…


…with a close-up…


…and some bikers getting a repair done at a roadside van. Kathie’s a sucker for bikers and runners. I think it’s the shorts but I’m not sure. You’ll see further evidence of this later.


And here’s a lovely pic of the same windmills looking back from Uterga.


I forget, Kath – was this the day that a passing motorist almost caught us peeing alongside the road in a partially wooded area? OMG – that was a close one! I almost peed myself laughing. Kathleen was much better at finding secluded spots for “comfort breaks”.

When we arrived at the Hotel Jakue just inside Puente la Reina, the registration desk lady recommended we check out the running of the “cows”, to which she gave us directions. I’m serious – she really called it the running of the cows. We finally found the place and this is what we saw.


Every Saturday evening, the townspeople of Puente la Reina close off the ends of this street and harass the stuff out of young bulls to make them run up and down the street. You can see in the pic the kids up on the balcony – they’re throwing things at the bulls, making them crazy with fright. Perhaps this is how the bulls get toughened up for bullfights? I don’t know; I thought it was really inhumane. Then again, I don’t get the whole bullfighting thing either.

Here’s the town’s namesake, the Puente la Reina, a Romanesque bridge built by the wife of Sanchez III specifically for pilgrim traffic. We’ll cross over it on our way out of town tomorrow.

The Happy Hiker

I was getting tired by the end of that last post so I neglected to note that what I had mistakenly thought was an overwrought groin muscle was actually iliotibial (IT) band syndrome.

And how do I know this? When I finally swallowed my pride and told Kathie of the severity of my pain, she checked for lumps along the left side of my left thigh and knew right away what the problem was, having suffered with it herself in the past.

And the treatment? Rest, ibuprofen, awkward stretching exercises, and Kathie’s pointy little elbow digging into each lump to tenderize it. Really, I think Adolph’s meat tenderizer would’ve been less painful. You know that sudden sharp pain you get when you stub your little toe on the bed frame in the night – the one that would make you fly up and hit the ceiling if gravity wasn’t holding you down? It was a bit like that…except you don’t stub your toe repeatedly and intentionally, thinking that it’s eventually going to feel better.

All the lump gouging in the world wasn’t going to be enough to get me on the road Saturday morning, though. Bigger guns would be required. Kathie fished around in her first aid pack ‘til she found her Vicodin. On the one hand I wondered if it would be enough; on the other I wondered if it was going to leave me staggering along the trail, drooling, and generally looking like a drunken fool. She very wisely gave me just half a tab and we took off.

I tell you that Vicodin worked like a charm! That Saturday and the following two days, I took half a tab around 9 or 10 in the morning (when massaging the lumps while walking no longer worked) and then another half around 2 or 3 in the afternoon. And was I a happy hiker or what? I left the other girls in my dust…


…although uphill was still (and will always be, I’m afraid) a challenge.


We met other hikers suffering with similar problems. For several days, we tracked along with one young man whom Kathie aptly dubbed “Barcelona” – after all, he was from Barcelona. The last day we saw him, he was hobbling along, barely making any time at all. When he described his problem, Kathie – without any warning – reached down and palpated the side of his bum leg. (The look on his face was priceless.) Yup, she said, IT band, and she recommended he get some rest and take ibuprofen. Amazing – I had never even heard of IT band syndrome before.

OK, so the next post will be about the hike to Puenta la Reina. By now, my whining was (almost) over.