a perfect day

we've been talking about a perfect day. just over a week ago we were at dinner with some fellow walkers. someone (who had done the camino before) commented that you don't get the perfect day until the last day.
by that he meant the pack is just right, the weather is perfect, the company good, the terrain manageable and you are well adjusted to the demands of the walk.
juan responded that he had only written in his diary the night before that he was yet to 'have the perfect day'.
the following day sickness hit and our subsequent days were far from perfect
i hadn't really thought about the perfect day. i've had some pretty good days. the days i like the best are when the walking is broken fairly regularly by small villages to walk through. even the days where we walk for long stretches along the highway i feel pretty good to have made it at the end of the day so that constitutes a good day for me.
we've had a bit of rain the last few days and juan now thinks that a perfect day might be when we judge the weather perfectly and don't have to stop to either put on our wet weather gear or peel it off because we have prepared for the worst and the worst hasn't happened. walking in wet weather gear when it isn't raining leaves you feeling like you are working hard while wrapped up in plastic.
today, by juan's criteria we didn't have a perfect day but we did have a pretty good day. we started early and had cheeros and chocolate for breakfast. cheeros are like doughnuts but in long strips and more crunchy than doughnuts. they are sometimes served tossed in sugar but you can also eat them with a kind of hot chocolate that is a bit like chocolate custard. they're delicious and a very good start to the day.
i should say at this point that we have both lost quite a bit of weight. juan has had to bore another hole in his belt just to keep his trousers up. hugging him now takes me back to memories of the man i married. he really is very thin so a breakfast of doughnuts and chocolate custard is a good thing.
today's walk was daunting as we were walking up a gradual gradient all day but the last hour and a half was very steep . we are in foncebaddon tonight which is 1439 m above sea level. given that the highest point we came to when we crossed the pyrennes was 1430 m above sea level we went a long way down to have to come back up again. that aside we had a good day. the villages we went through were perfectly quaint (i think we are now in a more prosperous part of spain than we have been walking through in the last week). everything you might imagine about rural spain we saw today. donkeys, goats, beautiful stone walls, springs, quirky bars and great hospitality. the weather was however, a bit unpredictable so we did have to do the changeing gear thing a few times.
all that said we managed to make the walk close to the time suggested in the guide book which is a big advance for us. on one of our first long walks the guide book suggested the walk would take 7 hours and we took 11 1/2 hours.
i was a bit nervous about foncebaddon because it was described in our guide book as having a population of 5, derelict and abandonned but there has obviously been a bit of development since our book was written and we're staying in a pretty good place
maybe not a perfect day but still a pretty good day