Day 8 - No room at the inn

Saturday 2nd September - No room at the inn

After a rainy night, today the day dawned cloudy, damp and with the promise of more rain to come. There seemed to be no prospect of flying so we walked in a South-easterly direction towards where we hoped to intersect the GR11 at Roncesvalles. The walk contoured by a succession of rough roads and forest tracks and, with the help of a Frenchman who's job it was to look after the seemingly infinite line of shooting huts (these are built at 50m intervals all along the ridge-tops ready to slaughter the birds migrating in Autumn), we were soon on track and heading down to the monastery of Santiago. Despite the importance of this particular spot on the pilgrim trail, and loads of pilgrims wearing scallops around their necks and conspicuous by their piling into the bar after mass, we couldn't find shelter for the night. There was no room at the inn. So, after shopping in Burgette, we got pissed in the bar and trudged out into the rain to bivvy under a large beach tree, using old stumps to anchor the corners of the tarpaulin, itself too small to cover us. Things did not look too good now. Simon started laying a fire and I suggested moving it to the other side of the tarp where, it turned out, it supplied us all night with constant fumigation by smoke. Despite being pissed we broke into our newly purchased bottle of rum and made a sizeable indent. And so we slept with feet propped against the logs to stop us sliding down the slope and out from under our partial shelter. Next thing I know I awoke to the sound of Simon yelping. While attempting to remove whatever it was that had run over his head, it had fallen down into his sleeping bag. There was some discussion about what could be furry, fast and small enough to be grabbed in one hand, but we agreed that it must have been a mouse that had taken a fancy to Simon's sleeping bag. And so started the saga of the mice...