Wednesday 18 October 2017

Wednesday 18 October - Elorrio

Where's Bertie? He is unmoved, in the Municipal Aire in Elorrio.
Weather: Overcast all day, plenty of rain, cooling to just 17 degrees this afternoon.

The original plan for today was to do this walk:

Seeing the forecast for rain all day, I modified that plan to just walk the eastern side of the loop, like this...

...and that's what we set out to do at about 10.30 this morning.

After rain overnight, it had been dry for a few hours at that point. Alas, the moment we had locked Bertie's door behind us, it started to rain. We wavered, before deciding to go ahead anyway.

The views of the hills were rather marred compared to yesterday...

...but the route through the woods was pleasant...

...except for the bit where we walked past a sulphur spring:

That was just plain pongy.

By the time we came out of the woods, the rain was really coming down. That coincided with us meeting a road that would take us a direct route back into town. It wasn't a difficult decision to cut short, so that in the end all we did was the blue and red lines shown below, plus the little bits of the originally planned route that joins them:

It came in at just 2.5 miles.

Ordinarily, we would have made a beeline back to Bertie for coffee and coissant, but as this town has been so kind as to give us parking, a service point and a town audiotour, all for free, we paid a little back by stopping in at a bar for coffee. We stayed there long enough for my shorts to get almost dry, but timed our departure ill, stepping outside just as the rain really started coming down again.

A stop at a bakers for this enormous chcolate covered confection...

...didn't give any opportunity to dry out, so our legwear was soaked again by the time we had walked the three or four minutes back to the Aire. Maybe we should have used the waterproof overtrousers we had with us, but this morning it was perfectly warm enough to just get wet in shorts. It got cooler as the day went on.

I'll finish with a quick mention of a shop we visited during a late afternoon stroll around town (we had been cooped up in Bertie for hours and needed a leg-stretch): we found a gem of an Aladin's cave, selling the most enormous array of stock, from a huge range of frying pans (which is why we went in) to huge flesh coloured knickers to a whole aisle of knitting yarn. I took a particular interest in the latter; Mick put his foot down and insisted that I have enough.

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