Climbing over the Pyrenees | Day 2

I will start today’s post by saying that the word for today, after climbing over the Pyrenees, is “humbling”.

Yesterday the thoughts were more like, oh my gosh, it’s beautiful, we’re so excited to be here, and this is really cool. Today? I’m happy to be alive after that hike. But I wouldn’t change a thing. It taught me a lot about perseverance and persistence in the face of ridiculous odds.

I also found myself singing a line from a Jimmy Buffett song, it felt very fitting:

Take it all in, it’s as big as it seems, count all your blessings, and remember your dreams!

As soon as we walked out the door of the Albergue that we were staying in, we were immediately faced with extremely steep switchbacks. We climbed from about 800 feet in elevation to almost 5,000 in a little less than 9 miles. I have never experienced anything like what we hiked today.

In addition to the terrain, there were very windy gusts, probably 30 to 40 miles an hour in our face. There were even a couple of gusts that almost knocked people over.

We finally got to the top, and then it was extremely steep going back down the other side. My left knee started acting up and I had to start walking like a crab to get down without blowing it out.

All in all, we walked about 37,000 steps, or about 15 1/2 miles today. I am sure the number of steps were a lot higher because a lot of our steps were very small and I’m not sure how the iPhone calculates steps other than maybe an average of 18 inches each. I can certainly tell you that I feel like I walked 75,000 steps today.

We finally got to the Albergue in Burguete.