Day 1 – The day is finally here!  

The day is finally here!  We started our Camino today. The weather has been warm in Southwestern France lately, so everyone woke up before dawn to get a jump start to their destination before the heat of the day. After a carb-heavy breakfast of baguettes and croissants (very common in France) with 4 types of homemade jam from local fruit by our albergue host, Joe at Gitê Bidean, we started our journey. 

There are two possible stops for pilgrims leaving Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port (SJPP) – Orisson, which is 8 km (5 miles) up the French Pyrenees; or Roncesvalles, which is 25 km (15.5 miles) and gets you over the mountain in a single day. Since we have not been able to do any hill training in flat Indiana, we chose self preservation and stayed in Orisson tonight. 

The Camino showed us no mercy, starting to climb immediately upon leaving our albergue.  For most of the day, we followed the one lane road giving way to cars coming down the mountain.  There were a lot of pilgrims on the trail and they spread out on both sides of the road. I wasn’t sure if we should be walking on the left side so we could see the cars coming at us like we do in the US, or on the right side as many others were doing. I thought “maybe these people on the right are French and know the local rules better than I do” so I moved over to the right side. Shortly after I did, a car came down the hill and “aggressively” waved us back over to the left side. Ok, I guess we walk on the left here too. Lesson learned. 

Holy crap, the hills were calf burners for sure!  We expected the first two days to be hard, but these hills were steep. So steep I had to break out the Apple Measure tool from my “sh*t I don’t use” folder on my phone because I remembered it has a level built into it. My handy new level told me our climb today ranged between pitches of 7 and 13 degrees. Think about that the next time you set the elevation on a treadmill!  Our day’s elevation gain was just under 2k feet. About 20 minutes into our day, we were very happy with our decision not to go all the way to Roncesvalles in a single day! 

The mountains are absolutely stunning and made the climb much more tolerable.  There were sheep and cows grazing in pastures set against green rolling hills around every corner. This was absolutely the French countryside I was hoping for. We took every opportunity we could to stop and take pictures (and if our legs got to rest while we did, then I guess that was ok too). 

After “only” about 3 hours of climbing, we rounded a corner and saw our spot for the night. Hallelujah!  We stayed at Refuge Orisson.