Day 2 A Pyranees Panoramic Day

We made it to Roncevalle...... yes

Set out in the dark again and the dawn opened up beautiful vistas of the Pyranees. Up the ashphalt with other pilgrims in the distance and behind. Again the valleys were quite inspiring... did not see the great eagles that soared the heights yesterday.

We passed the Statue of Our Lady and almost on cue the fog descended so that 1 metre vision was good.. Pretty exciting because we needed to detour over the heights and fields at a cross.. We found the cross in the fog and there was a Frenchman who had pitched a small tent and said he wasn´t going over the pass in the fog. He did offer to share the pup tent which was kind of him.
It was too cold to stop so we pushed on and for about 15 minutes there were not many markers until they started to appear and that was a relief. Just small red and white painted signs were very reassuring.
We came to the frontier and did the bonjour... buenos dies salutes.
The fog started to drift so that we could see into deep valleys. This path is now great because they were erecting numbered snow poles and there were more camino icons. The snow poles will be very useful for winter trekking as this area must lie under thick coats of snow.

Too cold to stop even though we had long donned our goretex jackets and were just thankful we had changed these in preference to the lightweight ponchos we had bought..

We headed past a group of day packers who were saying prayers together and singing a hymn..They had bussed past us on the road, got out at Our Lady´s statue. Perhaps a religious bushwalking group.. hard way to go on a picnic as we saw them dining later in Roncevalles.

Then down through some magic beech forest to the monastery...The trees were in autumn colours and we sat in the warm sunlight and lunched on the Orisson sanwiches.

We booked into a hostal as the albergue was not open to 4pm and we needed to regroup...lots of regrouping will be here.

We will go to the pilgrim mass in the church later.
We are tired but happy as the saying goes...will try to add some more interesting bits in this blog as it is sounding like a post card