I had been considering stopping early today to avoid hurting myself. Halfway through the day I was really glad I had Annalea and Trine encouraging me to push a little this morning (push out the door, more than push the pace), because I was confident I could reach the next "suggested" town tonight. Yesterday I was considering just taking a rest day to recover, so complete was my exhaustion. Today I can see that my body is adapting, and I look forward to a week from now when I'll probably be physically adapted, and then have to face the mental challenge of inward reflection.
It turns out day 2 ends rather roughly as well. There are several painful downhill spots where you're walking on loose pieces of shale. A stick definitely comes in handy here, and luckily I found one while leaving the hostel this morning (it was my consolation for how rough day 1 was, I figured that if I at least had a stick, it would probably help take some strain off my stabilizer muscles). Having a collapsing pole might be nice, because then you can strap it to your pack when not using it... We'll see how much I hate carrying it as I move on to flatter ground.
I started having knee pain today because of the shifting surface... I also switched to my "more supportive" inserts, which I mostly just brought to change which pressure points my foot was using... It worked great in the first half of the day, but for the second half my feet started to feel slightly bruised. I think that being supported in an "unusual" fashion just caused me to land on parts of my foot I don't normally use (Also they have good arch support which means my arch was being (softly!) impacted every step...).
After an incredibly rough patch of shale immediately before our "backup" town. The town we had been planning on was another 6k we away, and two of us had knees that were bothering us. We considered stopping but decided to push on. It was 5pm, so even if we took a really long time, we'd make it before it was too late in the night.
We were low in water and saw on the map that there was a fountain on the way out of town... but we never found it, so we probably went 3km with less than a liter of water between us (and most of that was leftover sparkling water). When we finally came across a fountain it was a joyous time, and then we had to walk a lot farther still to get to the proper town. Here's a picture of me with my hydration pack sucked dry:
When we arrived in town we found out that the main hostel was full, as was the next private one we were recommended... luckily the third we checked had beds (there was only one more place left to check after this...)
This hostel had *wonderful* showers, super high pressure, plenty of hot water... The place we stayed the night of day 1 had weird shower "closet" things, and the shower I got was aimed right down the wall, so I had to take my whole shower basically pressed against the he wall, because the water never came more than a foot away from it.
Of course, this hostel was also about thrice the price, but we did wind up being the only ones in a room with 6 beds, so that was nice (the pillows smelling of mildew was not as nice...)
Recommendation: bring a pole or stick for at least the first 2 days
Recommendation: Bring pants with a cargo pocket, as the extra storage on your person is invaluable. (Also bring something to wear when doing laundry.. Or else you'll be stuck picking through the like of "freebies* that other people leave behind.)
Recommendation: For day 1, there is a service you can pay to take your bag on to Roncevalles, this would not be a terrible thing to consider. Just carrying food and water over the mountain would probably help a lot, and the only judgement you'll get from those who carried their pack the whole way is "that might have been a good idea..."
