Last day of the trip. Again, a beautiful day. Much lighter from both the time and effort perspective and somewhat less spectacular visually.
One of the guys whose boot had broken had bought hiking boots for 16€, as you can imagine, these were not all that could be hoped for and were wearing his baby toe right off, indeed the nail was getting loose, so for the last day, he decided to go with the nearly dead shoes with some electrical ties to try and reinforce it all., see?
We had a relatively longish walk down through to the town after a lovely walk down and down through the hills. Not spectacular, but truly lovely. One couple in the group had spent a week in this town so knew a great place to eat. They even kindly let us leave our packs there while we had a wander around town. How light and free I felt without the pack on! So light that when we got to these stairs up to a sanctuary I wanted to go up. They thought I was joking and said they'd wait for me, so I started to run up the stairs. You can see that there are a lot. I was just kinda jogging up them when one of the other guys BLEW by me, so I picked up the pace and we ran up them. Eventually we both thought we were going to die from lack of air so we brought the pace down a little, still fast, but enough that we weren't wheezing....the stairs were those kind of long ones, about a half meter long to a little bit high, but the last three flights up to the sanctuary are normal, as we got to them I broke into a run and Toni after been caught flat for a second ran them too, we got to the top at the same time....good fun. Took in the view, lungs heaving, and we were about to descend again when we noticed the others, more sensibly walking up.
One other guy and I had started running down when they called us all back up for a photo, *pant - pant* then we were off again, right behind me one of the biggest men in the group and a bit of a loose cannon, frankly terrifying having him running down behind me, I hunkered down to one side and let him blow by me. People were pulling off to each side to let this crazed group of middle-aged people in matching orange shirts bomb down the stairs. Toni and I actually stopped running, the chance that we were going to fall and do ourselves serious harm was a little too high for me.
Hilarious fun. A great way to cap off a great 4 days.
3 comments:
sounds like great fun. I wouldn't dare spare so little on hiking shoes. Did you have to lop his toes off in the end? I hope he learned his lesson...
I agree - hiking shoes are an investment in staying afoot. And you can have those stairs! :-)
He only spent the 16 Euros on hiking boots as it was Easter Sunday and it was the ONLY thing open, his boots literally coming apart on his feet.
JG, you do have to spend the cash on the boots, if you want to be comfy. Same with running shoes. There really isn't any way around it.
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