Hills

We’ve been walking a lot of hills on the Camino. Up and down. Whew . .

Don’t get me wrong. I know hills. My state is named for its hills, and their color. But our hills have been done sensibly. We don’t put them everywhere, just in the places that we want to go hiking or skiing. As we’ve walked through the Basque country we’ve had to go up and down hills constantly. And they are put everywhere, even right next to the sea.

Who needs that? We don’t put them right next to Lake Champlain. And from what I’ve seen you can go the whole length of Jersey and never see a hill next to the ocean. So it’s not like you need them to attract tourists. Used to be that doing my steps was enough. Now I have to check steps and elevation.

And switchbacks. We have them. But we have them on mountains in the ski areas. Here they put them in the middle of cities. Bilbao is an otherwise extremely beautiful and very cool city built along the banks of the Nervión river. Huge hills on both sides. And switchbacks right there in the city streets and city parks. Wild.

If there is a redeeming feature to all of this, the locals seem to do everything they can to help. There are many streets that are walking stairs for pedestrians. Shelagh tells me they are called paper streets. When we came into Deba, a coastal town, on our third day there were two elevators to get you up and down the city streets. I kid you not. San Sebastián had an escalator in one neighborhood that we walked through. Wonder how that deals with heavy storms? And we’ve seen many funiculars to help you ride up hills. The kicker yesterday was coming into the town of Portugaleta and seeing the people movers that were built into the sidewalks. Some of them even worked. So no more complaining.

I used to think that the one redeeming feature of a hill was that it had a top where it ended. That was before I developed what my friend Riley calls toe jam and my feet hurt with every step going down. And that was before I came across a rope handrail to help me down some very steep slippery two inch rock trails that went on for a hundred yards or so.

Maybe I’m just getting too old for this?

Or too much of a whiner?