Post by Wynette: We walked 9 miles today. We spent an anxious 45 minutes on a tiny fraction of those miles. We sort of got lost. We have some GPS tracks that supposedly someone else has walked before and labeled as the Camino. We came to a fork where the Camino went right and our track went left. The track looked much more direct so we decided to follow the track.
The track took us over the large A8 freeway where the A8 went way below us through a long tunnel. This was a rugged dirt road we were on, but so far so good. Then the GPS track took us to a 50 yard long concrete tunnel that went under the A8, far below the A8. (We couldn’t even hear the A8 at this point.) It looked as though no one had gone this way for a long time, but we’d already come down a long downhill to get here and didn’t want to backtrack.
So we went into the dark tunnel. Even though we weren’t far from the A8, it seemed miles away and everything seemed remote and foresty. Of course, we figured there’d be a nice trail at the end of the tunnel. There was a walkway through the tunnel with a small stream flowing beside it. We couldn’t see but used our phone flashlight. We finally got to the other end. The walkway ended and the stream widened and we discovered there was no path at the end of the tunnel. Only a thicket of spiny gorse and thorny blackberries. At first it seemed impassable but man we didn’t want to backtrack at this point. We could tell from our Google map that there was a trail not far away. We managed to find a path of sorts through the thicket. We were wearing our rain coats and that helped.
After pushing through this for about 15 minutes we spotted a more open area down the hillside. Charlie headed for it and, because the hillside was uneven and he was top-heavy with his backpack, he fell down twice. There was so much vegetation it cushioned his falls. Luckily no injuries. In the more open area, we walked through viney ferns for a while and then spotted the trail. We headed for it and, to our surprise, first thing we saw was a Camino post! The Camino took us down a rocky creek bed but the Camino never looked so good. OK, we have had enough adventures for a while.
