At the Starting Line

    This will be relatively brief.  Although it has been an exciting 48hrs for us, probably not very interesting for anyone else.

    After a number of fits/starts and delays, the airline finally found a plane, which left Chicago at about 4:30PM.  We landed in Barcelona at 7:30AM (Bad Boys for Life was better than Captain America).

    Once in Spain, we took two buses to get to Pamplona, then rushed to join two other folks to share a taxi to get to Roncesvalles - Roncesvalles is one of the primary start-points for the Camino.  We arrived a bit before 6PM, about 48 hrs after leaving home.  The town is small, but is overflowing with folks walking/biking the Camino.  Everyone else (mostly on tours or Spanish nationals) set up reservations for dinner and hotel - I think we got the last room at any of the hotels (while we figure things out, we are not staying at the hostel).  We have not yet had a chance to mail our luggage (for the cruise) to Santiago to wait for us, so we are getting a lot of dirty looks as we tote our suitcases around (not observing minimalism).  It looks like we will have to ship them forward day-by-day until we get to a Post Office back in Pamplona.

    We are still very much figuring things out.

    Photo from the Roncesvalles Monastery, with the "Shell" (the symbol of the Camino) in the background.