Arriving in a unfamiliar, small, mountain town in the dark can be both the worst, and the best.

The Worst: = You have no bearings or idea where you’re going, you can’t see anything, and towns like Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port shut down really early, so there’s nobody around to help, etc. The hotel receptions also close early, so you have to figure out the non-instructioned after-hours check-in process, which always brings with it an underlying “am I gonna have to sleep on the street tonight” inner dialogue.

The Best = You wake up to a view like this from your balcony:

What a lovely town! I thought it was just going to be a nondescript transit town that you only stay in to get to something else, in this case, for me to start the Camino de Santiago. But, no, it’s another beautiful, medieval Basque town:

Bonus: The balcony was sunset-facing (and those mountains in the middle are what I’ll be walking over tomorrow):