🌧️ Camino del Norte Day 2 | San Sebastián to Zarautz – Storms, Struggles & Cider

🌧️ Camino del Norte Day 2 | San Sebastián to Zarautz – Storms, Struggles & Cider

Good morning on day two of the Camino. As you can see, looks like it’s going to be a bit of a wet day as opposed to the beautiful day that we had yesterday. We got a I think it was a 24k day today to Zuts, which looks like a fairly fairly similar day to yesterday. Maybe not quite as much elevation since we’re not going to have any of the crazy extra routes that we had. Interesting night in the Alber. We’ll talk about that later. I’m Chad and I’m Sam. And we are the AZ Nomads. And this is the Camino del Norte. Now, let’s ride. We go out to catch the waves. To catch the waves. [Music] Let it carry you. Carry you. Let it carry you. Carry you. A story we will remember forever. Coming with you, baby. Just keep walking though. Don’t look. So, the walk out has been all along the seaw wall, which is really nice. We can more of hear the waves and see them as it’s clearly dark and clearly raining. We keep saying how much fitter the uh people are over here in Europe and Spain and all that stuff. And apparently every single Spaniard runs no matter how hot or cold or rainy it is cuz I cannot believe the volume of people we’ve seen running by us. So good for them. But outside the rain been a nice start to the morning. So all day yesterday with all the hills of up and down and up and down, Sam was bathing for a tunnel. You happy now with your tunnel? I’m very happy. Thank you. Good. Now we don’t have to skip any of the uphills or downhills, right? Tunnels are only on flat ground. Okay. [Music] Once we got to the top, as you can see, the views are absolutely incredible. We got the ponchos off thankfully for a little bit. Hopefully the rest of the day or at least I got mine off. She’s still looking like a giant pink Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. I’m still a little cold. How’d you enjoy that walk though? The steps at the beginning sucked, but going through the uh the trees was really nice. Wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. Had to have the headlamp on and of course despite charging our headlamp 2 days ago, it was completely dead when we put it on. which means in the rain poncho’s off trying to find the headlamp, the backup headlamp. Uh it was funny though cuz as I was walking down the boardwalk down there, I was saying, “Boy, I hope we’re not going to the top of the hill and then we get up there and Sam goes, “Yeah, I think that’s the tower you pointed at.” So, we’re here. By the way, what? Speaking of the tower. Oh, God. No. No more history. Jesus. If you don’t want to hear about it either, go to this spot. The Torion de Igualdo, the tower of Igualdo, is about 180 meters above sea level. It overlooks Sam Sebastian and its bay. Was originally built in the late 1750s. It was built to be a navigation light, like a lighthouse in a military lookout. It didn’t have anything to do with the towers that we were talking about in the first video. The original towers really deteriorated, especially during the Carly East wars that we talked about in the first video. In 1912, the Monte Agualdo company, which owns all the lands, uh, restored it and rebuilt it. They added a new stony large window and a panoramic terrace and kind of turned it more into a a viewpoint. It’s beautiful, though. It offers 360° views of the city, the Bay of Lacona. It’s just it’s actually gorgeous up here. There’s even a little like children’s amusement park up here. And there’s even a venicular that you can take to get up there, which, you know, would have made it a hell of a lot easier than just walking up here. So, that’s kind of the history of Monteo. I’m sure Sam is very sorry that she missed out on that. Well, unfortunately, this commamino is not very well marked and we made some type of a wrong turn. So, we got to go back down just a little bit. I’ll be honest, Sam’s not happy, but I’m not upset. The views up here are amazing. And I don’t know if you can hear the ocean, but boy, it sounds great. The downside is Sam’s long gone. She is not happy with me. My fault. All right, don’t worry everybody. She’s forgiven me for getting us lost. At least I think she has. So, the weather’s been I just love it. It’s been overcast. Um, blue skies would probably make the views a little bit better, but I will take this incredible little bit of sprinkling here and there, but the rain seems to have stopped. Knock on wood. But she’s really enjoyed her Gen X Ninja Turtle outfit, so just decided not to take it off. Uh me in the meantime was really glad to get rid of the poncho because, you know, even though it kind of kept you dry from the rain, you were sweating so bad, you just ended up wet anyway. But we got these great views of these cows and mountains and animals, and it’s been a hell of a day. [Music] Lunch time. Yay. They are good apples. They’re really good. I’m glad I climbed up those trees to get them. This is really breakfast, not lunch. You know, it never fails. After you climb up a little climb like that, you get to the top and you see one Camino. You see a nice downhill and you think, “Yay, we got to go downhill, but it never goes the downhill. It always always goes up. Every time there’s an option, it’s always uphill. [Music] So on the chamino there’s something called chamino magic and it’s usually really cool when you find it. In this instance a little cold and wet so we’re not going to partake. But there’s a little hut here and in the hut they’re offering tea, coffee, things like that. And then you just leave a little tip whatever you want to do. says, “Please keep the environment clean and take your trash with you.” Very cool. You know, we got a bunch of people that have signed things on here all over the place. Job, baby. [Music] What do you think? A little bit of a cold, wet day. Yeah, I don’t mind the cold cuz I had on my poncho the entire time. That actually kept me warm. So, I was comfortable as far as heat goes. It was difficult cuz of all the water. I had to watch. You have to watch every step that you take. And I’m just tired cuz I only slept like I don’t know maybe 3 hours last night. Yeah. We’ll tell you about our awesome bunk mate a little bit later. We got lucky as as we were coming there’s this donutivo here. We weren’t expecting anything for a little while longer. There’s a chance we’ll hang out here for four or five hours before we get going. We’re anxious to get in tonight. We have a private room tonight. Hopefully, we can get a little bit more rest. Yes. What did you think about most of that hike? I don’t know. I guess I liked not most of it. I liked half of it. Um the last half until we got here it that sucked and not like that at all. Yeah, it was very very pretty, but it was uh just hard on the feet. Hard on to really watch every single step. Hopefully the next two/3 is really good, but we’re going to enjoy some hot cider. Enjoy being out of the rain for a bit. And salute. [Music] So, we just left Choco de Peragorino. Choco is spelled in the Basque fashion. I actually have no idea what it means. Sam’s back to looking like Pepto-Bismol. I had to put mine back on for a while, but then took it back off. We’re walking into the mist now. It was a donutivo, which basically means you leave whatever you want to leave. We had they had few different snacks all over the place. The guy behind the counter was from Germany and spoke English. The other guy was Dutch and spoke Spanish. And then the lady seemed to speak any language anybody wanted to speak, which was I thought was really cool cuz I ain’t be good at English, let alone any other language. What did you think about that hot cider? Oh my god, it was so good. I would argue that’s the best hot cider I’ve ever had. I’ve never been a big fan of hot cider. So Sam went back for seconds for the hot cider, you know, to help the old blood sugar out. So it’s medicinal cider. Just really cool that people that kind are willing to do things like that. So when things like that happen, boy are they a welcome break. Just perfect for a day like this. [Music] So, we’re going through a really steep downhill right now. Sam’s knee is just killing her. You can kind of see her. Where is she? There she is back there. Taking it nice and easy. Her knee’s bothering her. It’s slick. It’s rainy. It’s wet. It really is beautiful out here. even with all of this stuff. So, I’ll be stopping, waiting for her soon. Luckily, she’s in bright pink, so you can always see her coming. She’s really doing a good job for how much her knee is bothering her. As always, very impressed with her. Unfortunately, sounds like the rain’s starting to pick up again, a little bit more. So, we’ll see how it goes. Hopefully, we all make it back without doing a tumble. So, here we are walking into Zadoots, which is our final place for the night. Another 20 plusk day. I don’t remember what it was. Been a long time since I’ve wanted to play golf, but this golf course down here just looks incredible. So, a lot of rain, a lot of other stuff. Our place is all the way across town. So, we’re going to cross all of town, which is is what it is. Hopefully, it’s flat because nothing today has been flat. Zadoots looks like a goodsized little town. It’s kind of been one of those days. Been one of those days, baby. Yeah. [Music] So nice being in boss country again. We got to have our pinktos again. Boy, do I miss having this. We’ve got some fish. We’ve got egg with chorizo. We got some crab thing. And I don’t know that just said like a meat lasagna all on some type of toast or bread, couple glasses of wine for 15. This is part of the reason why we almost never do eat the menu or the the pilgrims menus either. We just find we’d rather eat this for about 15, which is pretty much the same cost that one of us would get a pilgrim’s meal for. We love it. We love eating up here in Bass Country. They’re basically just like tapas. They call them pinktos. Yum, yum. So, this one here is is pretty good. Um, one of my favorites out of the four. It has like um a biscuit, an egg, chorizo, and not really sure actually what that is. A French fry maybe like potatoes. So, it’s it’s pretty good. It’s a good breakfast thing. Um, I would say the next one would have been point with this. This is the lasagna one. That one’s also um pretty good. I would say that’s probably one of my like my second favorite one. And it it is just like lasagna on bread. Then um I think we’re missing one, aren’t we? Anyway, then there’s this one. It I thought it was going to be like a fish fillet, like a fish stick type of thing. It’s not. There’s like actually like a fish in it. It’s not good. If you want to see the other side of it, that’s what it looks like inside. So yeah, you can just see the fish anyway. And it’s cold and it is not very good. That wasn’t my favorite. Oh, the crab one. That That was really good. That tastes basically like tartar sauce. A big glob of tartar sauce with like some mixed vegetables or something in it. All one’s bad and the other three were okay. Um, the wine’s really good except that it’s really cold. That’s weird. But it’s good. But it still tastes good. So, we finished up the night here having dinner at Chicho Pilit. That’s about as good as I can do speaking Bosque. And I have no doubt I completely butchered that. But here’s a spelling for you. Bosque is definitely a very difficult language. really bad when it comes to trying to do anything in the Bosque language. We end up getting a couple sides of pigtos. While we were sitting here, there was a very interesting umbrella dance going outside that I thought was really, really cute. [Music] Tomorrow we have the longest day yet, but at least we have services along the way. Today was another day where we went. Luckily, we didn’t have to go to 17K. We stopped at a place called Choco Peraginos or Choco de Patel Green. So, yep, that’s all we got for today and uh we will follow up with you tomorrow. Okay. I thought you were going to ask me about today, like my opinion. Started off with our headlamp not working. I had to dig through my backpack while it was raining to get my headlamp out. Um so, finally got that out and within like 15 minutes, the sun was coming up. I forgot about that. my uh knee all of a sudden started freaking killing me. So everything took probably an extra what two hours you think to finish today because of my knee how long it took me to get down some of the hills. Yeah. And and it’s not just hills like pavement or dirt. It was p pavement or dirt. It was like b like rocks and boulders. So I had to watch like every step how I was stepping down with it being wet. It’s raining. It’s raining. It’s not pouring, but there’s it’s wet. It’s raining. We got to our place. Place is nice. Although, we couldn’t get in. It’s a hotel. We had to ring the buzzer. The doors just didn’t open. Nobody answered. Rang it again. He finally answered. Was trying to tell us what numbers to press on the keypad. It was so loud outside we couldn’t hear. Finally, Chad was able to find the code in his phone. So, we got in. It’s a cute place. It’s nice. So, I like that. Queen size bed. do a little bit of wash and then came to the slaves and the food was just okay. So, nothing amazing. So, I think the food could have been good. It’s just everything was cold. I don’t know if that’s the way it’s supposed to be served. It’s not like it didn’t seem like it was sitting out. I mean, the important thing is the red wine was cold, which is the only right way to drink red wine. Yeah. So, hopefully we can sleep well tonight and hopefully my body needs much tomorrow. And that was our day. Good night. [Music] My pink Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.

On September 8, 2025, we continued our Camino del Norte adventure from San Sebastián (Donostia) to Zarautz, and the weather decided to test us! 🌧️💨 From relentless rain to muddy trails and fallen trees, this day had it all — but it also reminded us why we walk. 💛

Along the way, we discovered Txoko del Peregrino, a tiny Basque donativo that served warm smiles and the best hot cider we’ve ever tasted. 🍎 ☕ The kind of Camino magic that makes every soaked kilometer worth it.

👣 Route: San Sebastián → Zarautz
📅 Date: September 8, 2025
🥾 Distance: ~22 km
🌦️ Highlights: Rainy forests, muddy climbs, donativo kindness, and that sweet cider reward at the end!

By the time we reached Zarautz, we were drenched, exhausted, and grinning — because some days on the Camino aren’t about the views… they’re about the journey through the storm. ⚡

📺 Watch our full Camino del Norte series here 👉 https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5l4kbz-sReNDrCq240Pi9WMkOOgYnqTV&si=ehXbYhYjcgbEhi_J
📍 Follow our walk along Spain’s rugged northern coast all the way to Santiago de Compostela 🇪🇸🕊️

💬 Have you ever faced rain or storms on your Camino? Tell us your most unforgettable day in the comments below!

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