Day 5 was a much harder day than I had been expecting. On paper I should have been fine... It was a "short" day (only around 20km total) and no major altitude shifts. Somehow it wound up being a very hard day though.
It started by finding out that the "complete" breakfast was simply bread and jam, even though they served omelettes for dinner the night before. So I opted to skip that and get breakfast at a cafe on the way, as we've been doing. So then out more day started by slogging down the 300m crumbling dirt/rock driveway of our hostel/internment camp, which immediately caused my knee pain from the previous day to return.
We went through a small town that had no amenities, then came to another that only had one market and one pharmacy open, so we bought breakfast, and stuff for lunch, and then I went and got a knee brace at the pharmacy. All together I think we spent an hour or so at this town, then we walked through a bunch of other tiny towns with nothing in them, while running low on water and becoming exhausted. Finally we came to a town with a fountain
but it had a sign that the water was untreated, and a gentleman told us not to drink it... So we had to go buy water. We then went back to soak our feet in the water draining from the fountain, and we decided to eat lunch there. This was another 1.5 hours not walking.
Then we made our way, slowly and frustrated, to our destination (Estella) , only to discover they had no rooms left in the city, so we had to go to the albergue just after the city, which took pretty much all of our willpower. Luckily we're right near the famous "wine fountain" so we'll try and head out early tomorrow and see that, and not take *quite* so long a breaks tomorrow.
After today Trine, Annalea, and myself have all expressed gratitude for each other's company. There are so many times throughout the day where we falter and the others take up the slack. Annalea having decent Spanish skills has certainly helped a lot. I could get by, especially things like ordering food, but when you ask for a bed at a hostel, the host gives you a bunch of rules and details about the facility, and takes you on a tour... I wouldn't get much useful information out of that exchange.
Now I am going to bed, and hopefully our plan to get up early and take shorter breaks results in a less exhausting day tomorrow.
