Yesterday was a day of plane and bus travel, always boring. But we are excited to be on our way. We flew from Madrid over the Pyrenees to Biarritz, in France. We then took a bus from Biarritz to Bayonne, and another bus from Bayonne to St. Jean Pied de Port at the foot of the French Pyrenees. Upon arriving in St. Jean, we began walking over the Pyrenees back into Spain.
St. Jean is the traditional starting point for the French Way:
There are two Camino routes from St. Jean over the Pyrenees, and we took the more scenic and steeper “Route Napoleon,” taken by the French when invading Spain during the Peninsular War. It’s a very steep almost unrelenting slog uphill to Orisson, where we are now, that’s much relieved by the scenery:
Orisson, in France, is about halfway up the climb over the Pyrenees. There is an albergue in Orisson where we will spend the night: 
There are many men and women in their twenties and thirties from around the world traveling the Camino alone or in small groups. At the albergue, we talked with a young woman from Taiwan whom we had first met at the bus station in Bayonne. She has been traveling alone in Europe for the past eight months. She hopes to finish up the Camino by mid June and return to her part-time time job in eastern Europe and more travel. She said that her mother is unhappy that she had left her husband behind in Taiwan to travel alone. She said that her mother had urged her mother in law to forbid her from leaving home. She calls her mother weekly, unless her mother calls or texts excessively, and then she cuts the calls to once every two weeks. She talked about her freedom and the value she places on it. But it seems like the freedom of an untethered balloon drifting off into the sky.
Anne’s has painted the road leading uphill from the albergue, the road that we will take tomorrow morning:
Kurt's Blog 