DEBA

Once we got to into the town proper, we had to find the police station, where the keys to the albergue were kept. The police were out fighting crime somewhere, so we decided to get some lunch. Ana soon winkled out the location of the restaurant we’d been told about, and that was a good thing, because we would never have found it on our own. It was on the second floor of an office building; there was no sign, and you had to ring a bell to gain admittance. We stomped in, packs and all, and created a bit of an uproar among the very conservative wait staff. Evidently, this was a “local” restaurant. Once the sticks were in the umbrella stand, and the packs had been banished to the geranium bedecked balcony, things settled down and everyone was quite civil. We had a bang-up lunch for 10 Euros, wine and bread included. I ate menestra de vegetales, merluza a la romana; battered hake, and my beloved arroz con leche; rice pudding.

Eventually, the policeman came back and we were able to get a room in the small albergue next to the Red Cross station, at the end of a little seaside park. A good thing too, because if it had been full, and I had had to climb the hill into Deba Alta to the large albergue, I might have packed up and gone home.

This albergue had a tiny room with two triple and one double bunk in it. Thank goodness everyone took pity on my poor knees and let me have the bottom bunk. We crammed in with our two Norwegians, whom I called the Viking Women in my head, and one young Brazilian cyclist, who was finding the going quite challenging, as much because of the dangerous highways as the hills, but the hills were no picnic either. He wasn’t sure he wanted to continue.

No amount of alcohol of rosemary, prescribed by the Vikings, nor Reiki, administered by Gisbert, seemed to help my knees. Like the cyclist, I was questioning my fitness for this adventure. It didn’t help that it was raining and cold.

We decided to find our own food for supper. Bread, cheese, apples, pears, olives and wine were found by various explorers of the town. When we got them back to the albergue we realized that it would be impossible to eat in that room, it was just too cramped. So, in our raingear, and lugging our many plastic bags, we set out to find a picnic spot. We ended up in the arcaded courtyard of the town hall, sharing the space with young kids playing pelota against a wall on which a sign strictly forbidding the playing of pelota was prominently displayed.



We tried to “borrow” a table from an outdoor café which was closed, on account of rain, but the owner rushed out and took his table back, so we were stuck with the stone bench which ran along the wall of the arcade. As darkness fell, we looked out on the townspeople under their umbrellas, scurrying home to supper.

We were cold, but the atmosphere we created was warm and full of laughter. I was only sorry that I was going to have to leave our merry band, because I just could not go on.