Today was another absolutely spectacular day. The sights were marvellous, probably the most dramatic sights I’ve seen so far on this walk. I was again travelling out from north to south and this time I was going uphill and on the way back from south to north I was going downhill. The path is easy because you’re on a piste (in Spanish, “pista”), obviously not a piste for skiing as there is no snow. Really, there are no difficulties at all, you just follow the piste until you get to the Collado de Caroche which is where I finished off yesterday.
There was plenty of water around. This is useful when you’ve got a dog. I was carrying water for the dog anyway, but I hardly needed it because there was water everywhere. In fact, most of it was in the form of ice but there were small streams on the side of the path. It was quite a cold day, about halfway through the day I realised I was quite cold and had to put on a woolly hat and gloves. The rest of the day I was okay temperature wise just because I was walking very fast. It was a very easy walk so I think I averaged about 6 kilometres an hour. I do some days when like today the walking is so easy. There is not much to say about the path. There are no complications if you follow my trail you will be able to get from A to B easily enough. Of course, the scenery was brilliant, lots of gorgeous small houses in ruin which gave the impression that they were mountain refuge points. But it seems people actually inhabited them as there are quite a few of them. I don’t think you need so many mountain refuge points. At some stage in history, people lived up here in the mountains at around 1000 metres. I couldn’t see many fields being cultivated or looking as if they had been cultivated in the past. Some of these houses in ruins have been restored which is nice to see, although one of the houses that I saw that has been restored was an awful job. There doesn’t seem to be much respect for the original architecture or original materials. They use a lot of brick, cement, and concrete rather than the traditional stone and wood.
At the beginning, the climb is steep then it levels off quite quickly. It was only the first three kilometres that’s me heading north to south. If you are going south to north, which is the more logical, you would be going downhill almost all the way and the last bit will be steep downhill because my beginning was steep uphill.
I want to make some comments about carrying extra battery power. I use my mobile phone for following the trails and finding my way and for creating the trails I put at the end of these blog posts. I also take photographs, so I use quite a lot of battery power between doing one thing and another. So, I carry with me an extra little battery. The company that makes these batteries (power banks) is called Veger. I will include a picture of the power bank below; in case anybody is interested in carrying with them extra battery power. It recharges my mobile at rapid speeds. It can charge your iPhone 13 to 60% in 30 mins. The portable charger itself can also be fast recharged in 1.5 hours via the 9V-2A type C input port. It is very small and very portable (ultralight and compact). When you finish the walk at the end of the day and, if you’re in a hotel or wherever you are, you can charge your mobile and the backup battery (power bank). The next day you will have two sources of energy supply. I have often thought of even carrying both my iPhone and my iPad with me to have three sources of energy. However, one needs to limit weight, weight is always a consideration. Nevertheless, I find my rucksack, my backpack to be something I don’t really notice and only occasionally do I suffer from any strain on my back. It’s insignificant for the most part.
You can check out the trail here:
Walking Spain 
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