Estella

We’ve stopped in a highly recommended albergue next to the river in Estella called Albergue de Curtidores. This is the view out of the lounge in the basement.

We’d not managed to reserve a private room but the three of us are sharing a four bed dormitory with one bed spare. For those of you interested in what these dormitories look like here are some images taken inside the room.

The doors of the shower and toilet are frosted glass so two have vacated the room whilst the third showers. It works 😊.

This dorm is far better than many. Some have many more bunk beds. Twenty person rooms are common whilst the albergue in Roncevalles has 90 beds per room if memory serves.

Enough of that.

In an ideal world we’d have covered a little more distance today. I was hoping to have reached the hostel on our last Camino in Villamayor but though we were up and out a little after 5:30 this morning our pace was slow and the stops many. So much so that we’d covered only a fraction over 7 km in three and a half hours, roughly 2 km per hour. At that rate we won’t make it to Santiago until Christmas.

Tomorrow has to be better and with luck and if I can prise Dorothy away from the Rioja wine fountain in Iracho, we should make it to Torres del Rio where they have an indoor swimming pool and hot tub plus great food.

Now onto today’s route.

This was the view at 5:30.

followed by the view back towards the town having just crossed the famous bridge. (A little post processing necessary here)

As we found yesterday and last time we passed this way, the path is crisscrossed by thousands of ants and snails,

the ants working together to take corn husks across while the more individualistic snails clearly have important business on the far hedgerow. Many don’t make it 😞,

crushed by the boots of the thousands of peregrinos making their way to Santiago.

Some big …

some small …

Today was a touch processional. Whereas on the Norte we saw two peregrinos in as many days, today we must have passed or were passed by, more than one hundred.

According to the official pilgrim statistics, roughly 200 pilgrims are currently somewhere on each of the stages from St Jean to Santiago and roughly 600 on each stage over the last 100 km from Sarria. Today we saw roughly half or so of those on our stage 😟.

Much more interesting than the people are the swifts that have been throwing themselves around the sky.

We’ve seen swifts around pretty much every church in each of the villages. They’re a gorgeous distraction.

We’re in Navarre and in two days we should be in Logroño, the capital of the Rioja wine region. We’ve started seeing vineyards popping up in amongst the corn fields and as we get closer to Logroño we’ll see pretty much every spare hectare devoted to vinaculture.

The path stayed mostly on farming tracks

with impressive views of upcoming villages. The last image reminds me a little of the approach to San Giminiano in Tuscany. Not enough towers but definitely reminiscent.

As always we were treated with some gorgeous flowers along the way, poppies popping up when you least expected them, chamomile in the path and Spanish broom in large clumps in the hedgerows.

We’re constantly coming across idyllic spots

which highlight the peace and tranquillity of much of the path.

A short interlude of a personal kind.

As Dorothy and I ambled along a narrowed section of the path surrounded by high hedgerows a small fly found its way into Dorothy’s right nostril. She gave a start (for which read loud screech) and dropped her poles. In between throwing her head backwards and forwards and forcefully trying to empty the nostril by squeezing the left nostril and blowing noisily, the fly hung on in there wriggling and buzzing. Screaming ‘it hurts, it hurts’ didn’t seem to help and my suggestion that it was either dead or would be shortly given the commotion she was making wasn’t terribly well received. Insisting that it’ll find its way out through her mouth met a similar fate. The fact that I was proved correct a few moments later mattered little as she showed me the remains of the poor fly.

Interlude over.

The earlier video of the swifts might suggest that they’re church birds but an enterprising pair seen flying out seconds before Dorothy passed have set up home in a long tunnel under the main road.

I may be obsessed by ants but these next three images are by any measure impressive.

This ant motorway was some 20 metres long and filled with thousands of scurrying little female workers bringing supplies from one hedgerow across our path before running safely next to the hedgerow and finally disappearing underground. Extraordinary.

We’ve seen our first caterpillars