Pamplona to Cizur Menor Part Two

Outside the albergue in Pamplona, Tom and I decided to join our Spanish traveling friends Jose Luis and Maite. They introduced us to Roger and Denise from England. Both couples were happy to meet us, primarily because Jose Luis and Maite did not speak English and Roger and Denise did not speak Spanish. I quickly became translator between the two couples and as I soon discovered, it was mostly translating jokes. Jose Luis and Roger were already doing a good job at pantomine a la Charley Chaplin but now, with me along, I could add dialogue. It was not long before my stomach muscles were hurting as bad as my legs. These two loved to have a traveling dialogue of humor and slapstick. Denise and Maite loved to chime in. As we left together, I joked we were like the herd in "Ice Age". That got everyone laughing and trying to figure out who was which character.

We all knew we carried too much weight in our backpacks. So, I told them we wanted the post office because we were going to send our not-needed and heavy items to my aunt in Southern Spain. Both couples thought that was a great idea. Roger and Denise were going to send things home to England, but I let them know that was too expensive. They could send them ahead to Santiago in care of general delivery and their things would be waiting for them. Jose and Maite sent their extra weight home to Valencia. We sat outside the Post Office waiting for it to open, pulling items out of our backpacks that we felt we no longer needed. Both Jose, Maite and I were astonished at what Denise and Roger had been carrying. They were geared up for camping so they had a tent, pots, pans, and assorted heavy items that boggled the mind. Jose said he tried to pick up Roger´s backpack the night before and nearly pulled his arm out of its socket. Denise´s bag was equally as heavy. They love the outdoors. Denise had just completed a 200 kilometer walk across Scotland this past May. Roger explained she had done it with a broken toe that was not discovered until she had returned home. Roger was to have walked with Denise but he had been hospitalized with a nosebleed that would not stop and required a transfusion of nearly 10 pints and surgery to fix the problem. Here he was walking the Camino. I felt I had no right to complain about my sore knee.

Anyway, as we sorted our things outside the post office, we got to know each other and felt we all hit it off very well and made quite an interesting "herd". By the time we were done at the post office, Tom and I had divested ourselves of over 5 kilos, Jose and Maite - 4 kilos and Roger and Denise, more than 8 kilos. That was quite a bit of extra weight we were carrying.

We did a quick tour of Pamplona and then headed out of town to the next albergue 5 kilometers away. While we took a quick stop at the bus station, where Tom and I had been just a few days earlier, Jose went in to buy a Spanish guide of the Camino. Outside the station, an older Spanish gentleman told us he had completed the Camino some 20 times. He directed us to an albergue in Cizur Menor run by a woman named Maribel. He said to make sure not to stop at the first albergue but rather the second one. We said our goodbyes, thanked him for his advice and headed off for Cizur Menor.

Our walk was rather quick and we arrived at Cizur Menor for a long-needed day of rest.