Way of the Wickeys: As long as there's a roof, we will sleep

One of our daily adventures is where we will find a place to sleep.

How our day works is that we follow suggested distances to walk each day, each suggested stage ends in a town with enough albergues to usually host all the pilgrims. There are usually smaller towns in between each starting and end point. Our daily distance varies from 20km to 30+km. We aim to walk between 25-30km and usually end up in a smaller town just past the suggested daily end point. It can be good because you get away from the crowds and the smaller hostels provide more of a community feel, but the risk of going beyond the end point is that you arrive at the following town later in the day and the hostels may be full. If the hostels are already complete, then you have 2 choices: keep walking to the next town or negotiate your way with the hostel owners. We have had to do both. We've walked over 30km to find a available hostel more than one. Most memorably we walked the suggested distance of 2 days in order to find a hostel in Burgos! I think we walked around 40km that day only to find out that all the hostels in Burgos were already full.
Kuya Mark has done some amazing negotiating to find us a place to stay. In one case when we continued walking to get ahead, we ended up in a town that had no more beds. Somehow, Kuya Mark was able to find us some bunkbeds in the garage of one of the pensiones (bed & breakfast)!

A few photos to give some examples of where we rest our heads at the end of our long days.

New municipal Albergue in Roncesvalles.

A gym in a sports complex provides a FREE roof over our heads. There were no other hostels so we were forced to walk an extra day's worth to get to Burgos, only to find that all the pilgrim hostels were already full. Luckily this gym was available as an overflow. We were the only pilgrims to use it that night.