Flip Flops and a Walking Stick

Yesterday we decided to walk to Cardona. We were guessing that it was between 20-25 kilometers from Solsona - I say guessing because we weren't going by the main road, or como vuela la corneja (the actual translation for "as the crow flies" into Spanish is just "in a straight line" so I like my version better - more colorful). We were taking a dirt path that follows el rio negre from Solsona all the way to Cardona - or so we had been told. The river doesn't actually show up on any map that we looked at, but there is no doubting its existence, as we were soon to find out. This walk was the first of our training walks to prepare us for the Camino de Santiago, so we weren't messing around. We packed our backpacks as if we were really going - to practice with weight and stamina - and set off for the day. We left at 10am for what ended up being 8 hours of walking. It was really nice out, cool, but nice, and we had some adventures thrown in there by crossing back and forth over the river we were following. Most of the time we crossed we waded in with our pants rolled up, using our walking sticks to keep us upright as we stepped on rocks while we crossed through the current. I had brought my flip flops along, since I was packed for real, and we took turns crossing using these. Kristian first, since we trusted his arm more than mine to send the flip flops back across the river. Before we resigned ourselves to wading across, we had some fun searching up and down the bank looking for a better spot to cross and lugging fallen trees to the bank in attempts to make a bridge. Highly amusing - but in the end the only way was straight on through. We never did make it to Cardona, which was further away than we anticipated. After walking for 5 hours we came out to a main road and found a sign saying 8 kilometers to Cardona and 8 kilometers to Solsona. We decided to walk the last 3 hours in the direction of home and save Cardona for another day. Today we're feeling good, not really any leg soreness, just getting used to wearing the packs for an entire day. So it is looking good for the Camino!