may 17 from roncesvalles - in spain at last!!!!!

I am dealing with a Spanish keyboard now but I think I was able to switch the keys to English.  There still won´t be any spell check but at least I can punctuate.

So here I am in Spain.  It was a gorgeous day for the walk across the Pyrenees.  I arrived in St. Jean Pied de Port on Sunday in the rain.  I wanted to stop in St. Jean because I thought there would be a pilgrim´s mass - which there wasn´t.  I also wanted to mail some things back to the USA and had to wait until Monday morning to do this.  So, instead of starting bright and early Monday morning for Spain I ran errands in St. Jean and then hiked 5 km (the steepest 5 km) up to the gite-hostel at Hunto.  That gave me a 5 km head start for today.  Instead of 27 km up and over I only had to walk 22 km.

The hostel at the abbey at Roncesvalles is massive.  I´m not sure how it works but there are two sections.  One is for pilgrims only and it houses 100 people.  The other section is the youth hostel (bicyclists can stay here) and it houses 60 people.

So the last two nights I had very little sleep because of the snoring going on around me.  Last night there were six of us in the room: three men and three women.  It was so bad it was almost funny.  It was like a chorus except they weren´t quite on the same beat.  I had my cell phone on for the alarm so I finally recorded some of the snoring as a voice memo.

I have no idea what tonight will be like.  If it is another bad night of snoring I may stay in a hotel tomorrow night just so I can get some sleep.  A Belgian woman that I met at the gite lÉscargot in Uhart-Mixe and who has ended up in the same gites for the past four nights got a private room last night because the snoring was so bad in St. Jean.

There are so many stories to tell about the gites where I have stayed and the people I have met I don´t even know where to begin.  And, I only have 16 minutes left on the computer.

So I´ll just start with my plans for this evening.  Some of you may know that today is my birthday and I can think of no better way to celebrate than to have walked from France to Spain on the Camino on this gorgeous day.  Nevertheless there is still the matter of dinner.  You can eat dinner at a local restaurant at either 7 or 9.  The hostel (albergue in Spain) closes-locks up-lights out at 10 pm.  There is a pilgrim mass at 8 pm.  So, I am going to dinner at 7 pm.  The pilgrim mass here is supposed to be pretty cool.  They call you up by country of origin.  I´ll let you know if it is as impressive as I have heard.

Weeks ago I sent my sleeping bag home because I was too hot.  All the gites in France (except one) had blankets.  Here at the abbey in Roncesvalles they do not have blankets.  I will now see if my grand idea of using my poncho as a blanket (that´s a plastic rain poncho not a wool Mexican poncho) was such a good idea or not.

I haven´t decided where I will stop tomorrow.  The number of pilgrims massed in one spot is a bit daunting and I´m not sure what it will mean for a place to stay tomorrow.  Oh well.  I have my poncho so I will be fine.

The Chemin-GR65 in France had an international element but it was predominantly French.  All of a sudden there are people from all over the world including a number of Americans.  The young woman sitting next to me in the internet room at the hostel-albergue is a student at U. of Michigan.  In St. Jean I ran inot a group of college students from PA who were walking the Camino for school.

Well, time is up so I will end for now.