We slept so well last night. What a relief. It was so quiet, calm, and cool. That was the best I could have hoped for prior to our last, “hardest” day.
Our guidebook assigns a difficulty to each day: 1, 2, 3, or E. Why E and not 4? No idea. It makes it sound more intense maybe. Anyway, today was our last “E” day of the whole trek. It struck me as a bit odd that when we passed the halfway point early in the day, we were also doing the last, hardest day. So the hardest days were essentially all in the first half, but for some reasons the author argued against walking this trail the other way. It would seem to me that maybe getting in shape for those days in the first half might be useful, but what do I know?
The “E” days have one or more large passes in them. So we had our last, big pass, Col de Mulleres, of the trek today. They’re particularly hard mostly because of the descents, which take a ton of mental and physical energy and often go on for many hours. The climb up today was surprisingly nice. I swam twice and Zoë even swam once. Hilariously, when we reached the top of our climb, nearly 15 other people arrived all at the same time. It was nuts. 12:45 was the time to be at Tuc de Mulleres I guess. At the top, we saw William from Phoenix who we had met on day 1, but hadn’t seen since. We chatted with him for a bit while we ate lunch. Some other lady asked us what we were doing and how long it took. When I told her 35-40 days, she said, “How do you do it? Are you a teacher?”
“Well I don’t work.”
“Ah. Retired.”
“I’m taking a break.”
“Oh. As we should.”
I agree. We should take breaks. I wouldn’t have considered it before, really. It’s hard to step off the work treadmill, and even harder to convince your partner to take a break at the same time. If you can make it work, people should try it. Many people can’t do it for various reasons like health, family, or financial commitments. It’s also not optimal to take a career break after 10 years, but a break can help give you perspective that you might not otherwise have had without many more years of work. At least that’s been my experience.
The descent started off with some at least class 3, probably class 4 down climbing from the pass. Zoë hated it, but we got through it. And with any luck we should be done with that for the rest of the trip. And we won’t do any more hiking trips with that degree of difficulty. (I’ll need to do some reading of the Alta Via 2 prior to us starting that!) The rest of the descent was pretty mild, relative to our other passes. Yes, it was over 3,000 ft of descending, but the trail wasn’t complete garbage. It did eventually devolve into its usual BS, but it stayed good for a surprisingly long time. At some point a cloud came and blocked the sun for a bit and it was actually a very nice temperature. The other day when we were taking one of our hitches out of town back to trail, the guy from the town told us he thinks this summer is on track to be one of the hottest ever in Spain’s recent history. Of course it’s the one I’m here for.
It took us over 7 hours of walking to get up and over the pass, and with our plan to hike about 8 hours per day we were looking for a spot to camp as soon as we got down. We found one in some trees and relaxed in the shade. I mentioned to Zoë the other day that the one thing the HRP doesn’t have is shady spots you can sit at next to water. It seems like a simple thing you could find anywhere, but trying to find all 3 together is extremely rare out here. Anyway, this campsite’s shade was good enough. Spain has this weird rule about camping where it’s technically not allowed, but tolerated between the hours of 19:00 and 9:00. What that means is you essentially can’t pitch your tent before 7:00pm. It’s weird because there’s not really any enforcement, except maybe outside the staffed huts. When we slept there, what we observed was people laid their tents out before 7, but they didn’t erect them until sometime later. We waited until a little after 18:00 before we finally just put ours up. No one else is here. Occasionally people walk by on the trail, but it’ll be 19:00 soon enough and we’ll be gone tomorrow.