Dorothy is home. 😊

We’ve arrived in Logroño, the capital of the Rioja region and the source of much innocent pleasure. It’s a mere 23+ km from Torres Del Rio so we delayed our departure until after the local café opened at 6 am.

Dorothy and I have been concerned about Tom. It seems that after he left us last night, the back of his leg swelled up and gave him some pain. Luckily it resolved during the night but this can’t be good. We agreed to walk separately and to meet in Viana, some 11km from Torres.

Back to last night. After the swim we joined the communal meal at 7. Sat along from us were a small American family of mum, dad and a young boy and girl, both 11 years old. They’d started in St. Jean Pied de Porte, some 144 km back a couple of weeks ago and are intending to walk the remaining 651 km to Santiago over the next four weeks. These kids are incredible 👌. They started out covering 12-15km a day but are now up to 24km (they walked from Torres to Logroño today) and will I’m sure make it. Dorothy asked and got permission to take and upload their photo, so …

Mum is a paediatrician with a Phd in biochemistry and dad is a maths teacher. Really lovely people with astonishing kids. It’s been 35 degrees and the trail today – 🥵.

The first event of note happened shortly after leaving Torres when we came across this bird (not my image, too slow to react).

Its a hoopoe, a migrant and quite rare. Astonishing to see what appeared to be a bird kitted out to look like a zebra scooting past at 6:30 in the morning.

Both of us remember this section from last time, particularly the imprinted concrete paths

Not the ideal walking surface in boots, but in Adidas supernova trainers, it’s marshmallow time 😊.

The sun is pretty weak at 6:30

but it grew in strength as the day progressed until the photons were like little hailstones by lunchtime causing Dorothy to lather my calves in factor 50 and her to cover herself so that only her fingers were available for burning.

There are some pretty weird sculptures along the path

I’m not at all sure what the point of that little collection is.

Note the extremely neat arrangement of vines in this panorama.

This is the sort of collage you see every now and again.

A small cross with a note in memory of a pilgrim who died nearby, a path marker and some poor person’s boots, presumably dumped in lieu of some Adidas supernova trainers 👍.

This is the scene as we pootled towards Viana, the first chance to refill our water bottles and get a proper breakfast.

The outskirts were pretty unpleasant, soviet era style blocks of flats, but the town itself was really nice.

Dorothy and I stopped for breakfast, sitting outside a popular café

next to a large church, which held the tomb of … (drum roll) …

I knew that he’d died fighting in northern Spain but for the full story take a look at the following link (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesare_Borgia) under Remains. He had an interesting life (notable understatement).

Tom arrived some 45 minutes or roughly 3km after us. His knee was in a bad way and in response to the change in gait his back was beginning to really play up. We had a long discussion on options. He was adamant that he wanted to continue walking at least to some extent and will now do so from Sarria, which is beyond the 100km mark to qualify for a compostela. We’ve sorted out the train journey on Sunday. Sarria to Santiago is full of pilgrims, roughly 750+ leave Sarria every day at this time of year and there are albergues and cafés every km or so. Meanwhile Dorothy and I will head out for Najera first thing tomorrow. The temperature outside at the moment is 37 but the indications are that temperatures should drop into the mid 20s for a few days before rising again. Hopefully we’ll get to Najera before the real heat kicks in.

Nothing else of interest. Here are a few more images to jog memories in the dark winter days.

Finally for Menna, A-tuin’s twin sister 😊

Buen Camino

addendum : when Dorothy and I stopped briefly in the trees (image above) for a 10 minute rehydrate and recover session, a young Korean boy, perhaps 19 or so, left his two friends to come across and offer us a third share of the orange he was about to eat. An example of the sort of kindnesses you see on the Camino surprisingly often.