Hello, everyone.
The next two days were in one way similar to the third day: up and down, and especially in the morning some steep climbing.
The thing that stands out most in my memory of the fourth day was a descent that had been given some care by the local people.
There must have been 500 steps in this long collection of descending stairs. Some of the people that walked it that day really, really hated it because their knees hurt. We didn't have any problem. We did take care to even out the stress of stepping down between our two knees. (I alternated 4 steps leading with the left and 4 steps leading with the right, over and over.) All the way down I marveled to myself about the steepness and difficulty of the trail here before they added these (new) stairs. The thought of trying to go down this slope on unimproved surfaces was enough to make me grateful for the steps.
Later that day, we came to the "green tunnel." There are walls on either side of this old road. Probably the walls are older than the surface we walked on. They were certainly buried under the greenery.
At Gernika we walked past the mural of the famous painting of the air raids and the memorial to the ancient council tree.
The next day we passed a really pretty wild iris.
If this variety hasn't made it into the gardening world yet, it's because the people who find and propagate lovely flowers haven't been looking hard enough. The lips of the blooms are fuzzy!
As Larrabetzu was discussed when we posted from the trail, I think that I will let the flower stand in for the village. We had pizza that night--a Monday, so almost no eating places were open at supper time--and called it a night. The next morning we headed toward Bilbao.
A small programming note: I will be out of pocket for a few days. Any posts will be a digression from this series. The recap series will resume when I return to my desktop computer where the pictures reside.
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