“Tomorrow you will enter the kingdom of Asturias and with it the road wins in exuberance and splendor”

By mutual agreement everyone slept in a little this morning; we’ve a short day, 15kms though with significant elevation (in both directions), but it’s been cold and dark in the mornings so we wanted to wait till things warmed up a little. An added incentive was that the bar next door opened at 8:30am!

As in the quote above, from a post on the Camino Salvador FB page, it was a stupendous start. Mountains, mist and sun. Unfortunately halfway up the mountain the mist socked in and our view was totally obscured. I tried twice to wait it out, hoping the sun would burn it off, but after a total of 40 minutes or so I left in a break in the visibility.

Eventually I crested with views of a wonderful bowl-shaped valley below. The path skirted around the hill to the left, down, then up and over to another valley on the left. I descended a rocky road narrowed by encroaching heather, turned corner and the trail thinned to a slit through hip high prickly gorse. Not great for one in a skirt!

Adam caught up to me shortly after and we continued on together. At one point we had to clamber over a barb-wired wooden fence, which caused a mini stampede amongst the cattle jealous at our successful bid for freedom!

Only 9kms down but 4 hours in we were glad to reach our only food stop for the day – a cafe at the mountain pass of Puerto de Pajares. A solid lunch of sandwiches and coffee set us up for the final descent. The views were drop-dead gorgeous of another valley “bowl” but the trail nearly did us all in!

It started off as a dodgy, steep, narrow, rocky cattle path winding down, down, down into delightfully shady woods but with deep trenches of mud to avoid. Then we had to tackle a sunny field that could easily double as a ski run in winter, through further tracks of recently dried mud, till we gave up and took the nice, solid, gently sloping highway the last kilometer to our albergue.

Today: 658m gain, 907m loss