Viana to Navarette 2

Wow. Okay. Thanks for all the opinions on how wimpy trekking sandals are, but YOU ARE NOT HERE. And I got ´em yesterday before everyone started yelling at me for them. But first things first.

Viana is a black hole. A beautiful one, but a black hole. Things get to Viana in your pack and when you leave, they are gone. Sigh. No one stole stuff, we just left stuff behind. Felix lost his pilgrim´s passport, and now has a sad little booklet with ONE stamp to show for eight days´ walking, and it´s not even frameable. Poor guy. They even slept at the church´s donation-refugio, where they paid 2€ to sleep on the floor. Rough night.

Us too. Skip wanted to get an early start so we could get to Logroño and get some things we decided we needed. We both had gotten third level bunks, which were awful, not only because it was such a hassle to get to things and there was no floor space, but the mattresses were really thin and there were no pillows. Pout pout. Stuffed all my clothes into my fleece and made do. Anyway...we were trying to be out by 6:30 and made it out by 7...not bad. Twenty minutes outside of town, he looks at me and goes, ¨You DID get your walking stick...?¨ ARRRRRRRRRRRRGH!!!!! No. He told me he´d wait if I wanted to make a run for it, but after an agonizing couple minutes, I decided that was against the rules. Both going back and making someone else wait. I feel awful because it was a gift from Christa AustriaMozartNoKangaroos, and now I´ve gone and left it behind. But I guess someone else is supposed to pick it up now.

The walk to Logroño was quiet and unremarkable. Lots of construction on the outskirts of town...kind of jarring. The scenery is nice, but then you hear a far-off jackhammer that totally undoes the whole feeling of the last eight days. I mean, we´ve barely even seen much car traffic, much less modern-day construction. Our little towns may as well have been in the 12th century, by the looks of them. Suddenly we have highway traffic and cranes and construction. The sky was purple in front of us for the longest time, and we were sure we´d get rain, but lucked out and it disappated in the late morning.

Skip was hurting...needed a bathroom. After what seemed like hours, we passed a little hut on the side of the road advertising a stamp for our passports. We stopped and I asked if they had a RR for him...she said ¨No tengo un baño. Campo. Campo.¨ I´m not sure, but campo = FIELD??? Lol. We got a stamp and walked on. After about three more false starts looking for some relief, I finally accosted a guy in a blue jumpsuit (ubiquitous here...work uniform?) sitting outside the doorway of a building marked ¨CREMATORIO MUNICIPAL.¨ He was VERY nice and apparently there was one on the other side of the graveyard. Skip said the plots were family plots, not individual graves. Just a spot of land or a memorial with a last name, and the first names listed under. I didn´t go in.

Planeta Aqua was the goal. Hiking-camping-fishing store. YES, I got the sandals. Even managed to score a pilgrim´s discount and a stick. Skip got sandals too and a new pack. It was kind of a production, and very disheartening. I did a lot of homework on my boots before I got them, and I did break them in, but when you´re hobbling every step and can´t walk and have no freedom of foot movement, you´re MISERABLE and so is this trip. Screw it. I dropped the money and got the sandals. (DS, quit chewing my ass. :-p) I hate it that they were expensive (even without the exchange rate), but they´ll last a long time and this won´t be my last trekking trip. I just couldn´t stand hobbling through another day. Besides, a lot of the mountain stuff is either behind me or far ahead. Right now we have a lot of footpaths...don´t necessarily need the boots at the moment.

I did NOT, however, send the boots ahead. Didn´t want to need them and not have them. Skip tossed his boots after he bought the sandals and is now more miserable than before...loves his pack, but hates his sandals (at least for our purposes now). Poor guy. He even offloaded about 5kilos at the post office...either ahead on the Camino or back to Perth. Good for him. It probably took him 45 minutes to sort through everything in his giant pack and downsize it to the new one...we had just hit a bookstore and got guidebooks, and I chattered away with facts about things ahead and behind while he fumed over how much stuff he had. When he was done, we tried to throw away his big bag, and this OLD old man came up to me and got REALLY excited about the pack, so I gave it to him. He hobbled off to the cathedral with it...God only knows what he´s going to do with it.

The Cathedral in Logroño is BEAUTIFUL. Two huge spires...storks nests on them. STORKS. They´re huge and everywhere...and they make this strange, loud clacking noise with their beaks, for about 20 seconds in a row. They´re really pretty!! We got through the church...lots of paintings and statues and things that would be more interesting if I knew what they were all about. After that, hit the post office and the BAR (Skip´s foray in the post office was about 45 minutes too, so we really dropped some time in Logroño and needed a beer before we headed out). The bartender was very helpful in getting us back en route, and it was good to get some food in us.

The walk to Navarette was really beautiful. It took us through a park along a lakeside. People were fishing...there were campsites and a little cafe with ice creams (WONDERFUL). The trail wound for a while between fields, the lake, and vineyards, and Skip started to get farther and farther behind, so I went ahead. The rise in the path gave a gorgeous panorama of how far we´d walked that day. At one point, Logroño was sitting in the sunlight while everything else was in shadow...that was cool.

After that, the walkway was on the other side of a chain link fence, high up above a freeway. People had woven sticks into the chain link, making crosses. Hundreds of them. Don´t know why. Like my buddy John told me, there´s a huge black billboard silhouette of a bull high above the town as you approach it. Again, no idea why. Nice walk into town, lots of climbing to the albergue.

Found my boys. =) And Hank and Yasmeen. Al went another 5km ahead, =(. Hank is sure we´ll see him tomorrow. When I got to the albergue, there were apparently only 4 beds left, and they wouldn´t let me reserve one for Skip...but he hobbled in an hour later and made it anyway. The French couple from yesterday are here...dunno if I´ve mentioned them. Nico has a mass of brown dreadlocks down his back, lots of earrings, and is quite possibly the most beautiful man I´ve ever seen. Not a whisker on his face...beauty mark down near his jawline, chiseled features, long and lean...he should be a model. His girlfriend, Maelle, is, if possible, even more beautiful. She´s one of those girls who has such perfect features that she doesn´t need a drop of makeup. She has a surface piercing between her eyes...a vertical barbell with two small silver balls above and below her browline. They are very nice, smoke a lot, don´t speak much English, and I have a hard time not staring at them. GORGEOUS people. We met them yesterday and I had the presence of mind to take a picture of them talking to Skip.

The albergue here got 3 scallop shells (out of 3) in my guidebook, but it was only okay. FOUR flights of stairs. First time I haven´t been in a bunk bed. Sometimes they let you pick a bed; sometimes you get assigned one. I came in right after this old guy, and got a bed about 3 inches away from his. WEIRD. When I finally got to sleep, it was very strange...so I tossed my pillow down to the other end and slept the other way. Ha ha. =)

Last night, there was an Englishman and a Frenchman talking with Hank at dinnertime. Michele and Sean. They had started in St. Jean Pied de Port FIVE DAYS AGO. 164 km in FIVE DAYS. These guys are powerhouses. And neither of them is a day under 50, perhaps not under 60. WOW.

All for now...gotta get on the road. All three of the boys have gone on ahead. Felix came in a few minutes ago and said there´s a change of plans...we´re going to Azofra today...1 hour longer on the road. That will take us...598.2 miles from Santiago. UNDER 600KM!! YAAAAY!!! =)

Love you all and thanks again for the comments. So glad to hear from my bro...Drew, thanks for the advice and inspiration...a lot of it I´ve already learned on my own...quit chewing my ass about the other stuff. =)

Mom...kept forgetting to say, thanks for fixing my trunk!! Dad, good luck in the golf tournament. =)