The loud bells of the nearby church kept ringing every hour right through the night but I only remember 2am and 5 am!

The local bar only opens at 10am so I ate my muesli bar and bruised apple I’d been carrying around for weeks and headed off. The next town was only an hour or so walk away and had a bar.

After about 30 minutes, I passed the beautiful monastery where I had hoped to stay last night.

As a trombonist, I’d say these angels are playing trombone, or maybe its ancestor, the slide trumpet.

One of the monastery cats posed for me ,’Cat and Rose’.

I foraged some black berries and figs along the way as I was quite hungry. This is what my Fitbit reported about yesterday.

I ran into Rosemary and Heidi again at a point where several hundred metres of wooden stairs have been built over a notoriously difficult descent.

At the next town, I got a coffee but they only had little rolls sealed in plastic but I was planning to stop for lunch I Guernica.

The rolling countryside today was very attractive.

Even the horses have bells around here.

Another scarecrow.

The gardens are very pretty with lots of flowers and the houses are impressively large.

Peppers and onions hung to dry
A very old bridge
A fast walker whizzing by.
And a cyclist

A few kilometers before Guernica I came across a tavern, it was 1pm, I was hungry and they had a pilgrim’s menu!

Guernica is the town that was heavily bombed in 1937 during the Civil War with heavy civilian casualties. The town was almost completely destroyed.

A mural copy of Picasso’s famous tribute painting has been installed in the town.

This is the trunk of the old Basque assembly oak tree planted in the 18th century. A new one has replaced it.

Guernica is a usual stopping point along this Camino, but as I’m planning to walk to Bilbao tomorrow I kept going for another hour or so to a rural albergue. I needed to bring my own dinner but I passed through Guernice at siesta time . Luckily I found an Arabic grocery store open.

The albergue is run by Arrate who started it this year. She also has 70 donkeys as well as a Zebra!

Here she is with Viktoria from Slovakia.

I cooked up my pasta and combined it with Alain and Catherine’s bread and sardines as second course.

Tomorrow is a relatively easy 21km walk to the city of Bilbao.