Walking the Camino

We got going about 8:30am (last as usual) and headed up the hill to Alto del Perdon.

The path up to Alto del Purdon - with Wind Turbines on the ridge

The whole ridge is covered in Wind Turbines, and there was  a monument to pilgrims at the top.

We continued down the other side, standing clear occasionally to avoid the mountain bike riders that are also doing the Camino (although much faster than us).

Along the side of the paths are lots of plants, including Blackberries, that as we get further west, are more likely to be ripe.

Judy had a cafe solo grande (long black coffee) in Utegra, and we detoured to Eunate to see an octaganol church that was linked to the knights templar.

We had lunch that we carried with us, and then continued via Obanos, and then to Puente La Reina, where we had a buffet dinner. The was the first buffet dinner in Spain, as normally thay operate on a fixed 3 course menu. Total of 17km for the day.

After our nice rest day in Pamplona, we set out at a very late 11am towards the hills. It was warm at about 27C, and sunny. We made a good pace through the suburbs of Pamplona, stopping at the University to get our credentials stamped, as we had not had them stamped anywhere else in Pamplona.  We reached Cizur Menor and stopped for lunch in the shade. Leaving Cizur Menor it was very open fields with not much shade.  We started the uphill walk towards Alto del Perdon, which is topped with Wind Generators.

About 3:15pm in the afternoon we reached Zariquiegui, having done about 11km. It is a very nice privately run Albergue, that provided accomodation for 10 euros including breakfast. They also did dinner for 10 euros which was great around the big dining table.

Walking out of Pamplona with washing drying on the rucksack

We have carried a netbook computer with us on the Camino. We are both online retailers, so we need to keep in touch with our websites and customers – even if its only in a limited way. We purchased a Yoigo usb modem from The Phone House in Pamplona. The Phone House is at Avda. Carlos III 67 31002 Pamplona, which is easy to find. There were some difficulties setting it up (probably more related to our netbook than the usb dongle). It now works fine. We have with the current deal 100mb a day for 3 Euro. We will see how it goes.

A couple of blogs and forums with useful infomation on spanish broadband are The Laptop Junction with information on the bleeding edge of traveling with a laptop, and the prepaid gsm forum, which will probably have new deals.

UPDATE:

Well we have been using Yoigo for about 2 weeks and it is working well. Only once have be blown our 100Mb download limit, and that was when we were stationary for one day. We have been charged 2 Euro a day, which is the current deal with Yoigo if you recharge more than 20 Euros. We have had mostly fast broadband with only a few out of the way places giving us only GPRS, or sometimes EDGE. GPRS has been more common in the mesata – between Burgos and Fromista. However GPRS has been fine for email, especially if we use the Flock brower rather than Firefox.

You can check you remaining balance on MyYoigo, and we successfully recharged our account online at Yoigo

UPDATE 2: We completely lost mobile broadband between Santa Catalina de Somoza and Molinseca. we could pick up an EDGE signal, but it either would not connect or would not stay connected. Once we got down the mountains to Molinaseca we got back to full rate mobile broadband.

Greg outside The Phone House Pamplona