From Estella to Los Arcos.
22kms. 7h.
Although I have to say that my feet are in a very bad shape, I woke up today with a highly motivated body to throw myself into the stage’s kms. As and when I was walking, I was discovering that it was all about a formula.
06:00 AM (or before) : we all wake up. Impossible to keep sleeping, so everybody get up to have the inn’s breakfast and prepare the backpack.
07:00 to 07:30 AM : DEPARTURE. We get out, take our backpack as if we didn’t say the day before “Oh my got, I’m so in pain!”
Between 07:30 and 12:00 AM : Kms go by like if we did this all our life. At noon, you tell yourself “at what time did I do 13kms? I didn’t even feel them.
All these stages have their own complication. This complication is often at the beginning and you just face up to it with philosophy; others are at the end, and this is not funny at all. Anyway, when 8 kms are still to go, it’s like an enormous weight falling on you. 4 kms left and you feel like you can’t move anymore, like you’re going to pass out, sometimes you cry, sometimes not, sometimes someone lied about how many kms are still to go, how hard this is!
Then you arrive to the inn, drop your bag, take a shower and suddently, everything is over. You carry your pain with dignity, you are reassured, you talk to the people, you eat something, you come back to life. You remember nothing about what you’ve been telling to yourself in the last kms. You listen to everyone’s advice, so you rub yourself with rosemary’s alcohol, anti-inflammatory cream, menthol, you break through your blisters, you stretch…
At 11:00 PM, the day’s over, you struggle to concentrate and forget about the snoring, or maybe you’re the one snoring…
At 6:00 AM, the day begins again.
Without delay, you just start over.
Anecdotes
Los Arcos and Gerardo Zúñiga
Los Arcos is a tiny village of about 1000 souls. But it posesses one of the most expensive churchs of the XVI century Navarra. You get to a square passing through an arch and the church you see let you open-mouthed. Its walls are made of silver. It is full of wonderful stories and offers many details about its construction. The famous Lady of Los Arcos presides over the door and only twice a year, its structures is lighten by the sun. The 24 of april and the 15 of may, at 20h37, when it’s lit up, it looks like in the picture Don Gerardo Zúñiga, a Los Arcos stock. The old man got closer to me while he was seeing me being interested in the door ; he showed me the picture, told me its history and realizing I was getting captivated, he offered me to go inside so he could tell me the full story. The cloister is one of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen; on each axis, you can see a carved medal in which is told the Dante’s Divine Comedy, on 48 headstones. Mister Gerardo Zúñiga was a blessing. We said goodbye with tenderness and after more than half an hour being an absolute guide, he left without asking me for anything in return.
The Analogue Project by Oleñka 