May 15, 2025
Vente de Arrieta to Pamplona
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We are in Pamplona basking (or is it Basque-ing?) in our Basque-ness.
We fiddled a lot with the route to Pamplona: a lot of the Komoot-suggested route was on gravel and after yesterday’s experience outside Roncesvalles we were not too excited about that. Elisa and Guillaime had warned us that much of the main road was pretty busy. The infrastructure for the Eurovelo 3 route is being built out but it was not yet completed.
As it turned out, we traversedthe main road and that was no problem, although it was not a particularly relaxing ride. We left at 11 am after a fun Basque breakfast including toast with spicy tomato paste on it, similar to the Catalonian toast we had last summer in Girona. We are constantly amazed at the regional variations in eating. Now it’s lots of tomato and spicy tomato paste and we are seeing a lot more processed charcuterie rather than just ham.
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It wasn't raining but the skies were full of gray crowds and it was windy so we felt the pressure to ride quickly and beat the rain. The first 7 or 8 km were downhill on a quiet road but we pulled onto the NA 150 pretty early in the ride and that proved to be the main road that we rode on for much of the day and it was much busier.
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The road had a 3 foot shoulder, it was pretty clean and the passing traffic gave us enough space. It was safe, it just wasn’t fun.
As we neared Pamplona the route put us through an industrial park that turned out to be a suburb of the city.
We eventually hopped on a cycle trail so the last 10 km all the way through the City was fun with some pretty scenes.
Pamplona felt like a big city. It’s only 200,000 but it felt pretty intense as we rode through the center to our hotel, Blanca de Navarra, on the edge of the center of town. Our hotel is quite nice (hardwood floors and good a/c) and the staff were patient about storing our bikes in a storage room off the garage. This can get a bit embarrassing as we then need to take out the batteries, a fussy process and hard to do when the janitor/clerk is standing there wanting to lock the room up.
I usually confirm the tub when we check in but today I forgot, and we got our gear up to our very nice room and after unloading everything we noticed it only had a shower. Because we were staying two nights, we decided it was worth it to try to change it, but it meant digging up the booking (to find the confirmation where it says “bathtub” ) and going back downstairs. It was pretty clear that the tub detail had blown right by them and we had a funny exchange where the two women staffing the front desk cruised through their bookings. Apparently the hotel was fully booked so any room change caused consequences, but success was achieved eventually and they were quite nice about it. Unfortunately our panniers were wet and we had tracked water into the room we had to vacate so I was madly using a piece of toilet paper to mop up as we backed out of the room so it would look pristine.
That evening we walked about a mile through old town Pamplona to Restaurant Baserriberi; a place billed as having modern Basque cuisine. The earliest reservation they would take was 8:30 and there was only us and a table with a little boy for about the first hour. It started to fill up at about 9:30 pm. The scene on the walk over was hopping (and made us realize how introverted we are!) After only being in Spain a couple days, we recall how much noisier and more emotive Spaniards are than the French. There are loud greetings and much more gregariousness in their interactions.
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The good news was besides the dinner being different and very good, they served it relatively expeditiously so we managed to finish up a little after 10 pm. Otherwise we would have been falling asleep in our white chocolate mousse/cookie thing we had for dessert!
For some reason on the walk over my knee was bothering me and then Dave’s knee started bothering him too - sympathy knee on his part? Hopefully you will not hear much more about that!
Today's ride: 50 km (31 miles)
Total: 706 km (438 miles)
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4 weeks ago