After an absolutely beautiful evening of resting on a hotel patio with the doors open and ocean air rising up to our room, we ate another great breakfast and headed out early for our 18 mile day today.
Merritt kept commenting throughout the day how awesome this hiking day was. The location – the ocean views – the local quaint villages – the summer vacationers filling the beach communities – the massive rural gardens (I have garden envy!) – the rest breaks and food along the way – all added up to a banner day.
We followed the Camino Del Norte along the coast as we made our way to Castro Urdiales. This is a seaport of northern Spain, and is situated on the Bay of Biscay. It is a beautiful modern city with a historic castle and Gothic style church of Santa Maria de la Asunción, that date to the Middle Ages. Its chief industries are tourism, fishing, and oil packing of fish, especially sardines and anchovies.
We also saw the remnants of the mining industry along our route and saw one mountain completely strip mined – almost appearing as an old step pyramid from ages past.
We keep striking out with most of the historic churches being closed. The same is true with our schedule on some other sites as long afternoon siestas are in for the summer season. Most everything shuts down from 2:30 to 5. The street cafes are in full swing and the hospitality of friends and family filling the tables adds to some enchanting late night vibes that warm your heart. If more folks gathered at table like this our world would indeed find more happiness through connected relationships.
We aren’t yet adjusted to the time flip so after about 5 pm Merritt is like Santa Claus and bedded down for a very long sleep. I spend some extra time working the wikiloc app to map our days ahead and to take snapshots of hotel addresses and street locations. Creating those maps has been fun to do. Yesterday as he was sleeping I hand-washed the clothes and used the bathroom hair dryer to get them dried out in time for the next day departure.
Pilgrim Ways has done an excellent job with the bookings for our stays and moving our 2 small bags to the next locations. We are hiking with just our day pack for the things we need throughout the day. I am much more relaxed than when I hiked the Camino seven years ago – the addition of a gps app to minimize confusion of the routes and knowing we have a place reserved for us after a set amount of miles makes for a more enjoyable experience.
What a joy doing this trek with our son Merritt. My heart sings doing this together.
Johnson 2025 Sabbatical 
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