21.1 km ~ 29,723 steps
Song of the Day: Foreplay/Long Time – Boston
Well, last night was rough. In our little seedy pensión, I woke up to the sounds of Maverick puking. Twice. At around one in the morning. Naturally, I was cool, calm, and collected about the whole thing…..yeah, I sobbed and didn’t know what to do an went into an overthinking generalized panic. What had I done? I was pushing him too hard. He didn’t want to do this. We shouldn’t be walking so much. What if something was really wrong?
I didn’t want to stay in that place another day, so despite not knowing what had caused Mav to get sick or if he was ill, I decided to head out early, 5:30, so that he wouldn’t be walking in the heat of the day. I also carried his pack for him. And I had decided we wouldn’t go the full stage to Puente la Reina like most others planned to. We would just do a short day. We could do this.
Today was beautiful. We took it slow, I didn’t want to push Maverick, and ended up seeing many of our friends we had made from the bus trip from Bayonne to St. Jean on our very first night and they all were so thrilled to see Maverick. For a dog who normally couldn’t care less about other people, he was hamming it up for them, happy to have more people to throw his stick for him. You would never know he had thrown up what looked like 4 meals that night.
We got our first taste of wheat fields today, with beautiful breeze blowing through, before climbing up to the pilgrim monument at Alto de Perdón. The views from here are incredible, 360 degrees, before dipping back down steeply into more fields. Just before we reached Uterga, a man selling fresh cherries from his truck stopped me and told me how I would be fined if the police saw Maverick without a leash. I thanked him for the warning and I explained how he had one and unclipped it from around his neck to be extended and the man laughed, giving me 5 free cherries to take for the road.
We stayed at Casa Baztan, a lovely albergue that allowed Maverick to stay right in the bunk room with me for the night and also let him roam out in the back garden, chasing butterflies while I lounged in one of their hammocks.