Day 7:Logroño to Nájera, over 30 km in 7 hours

Last night, we said goodbye to two of our traveling companions from the first week.  Phil  Martin from Dublin and Cristina from Barcelona.  Some people come to do the whole Camino.  Some come for only parts.  Some hurt themselves, and don’t finish.  As you walk, you get to know a cohort, but things remain in flux as you leave some behind and catch up to new people.

From the left, Gregor, Tristan, Karin, Me, Phil, Antonio, Oliver, and Cristina

This is not a race, but if you dawdle on the road, the afternoon sun will kill you.  Our plan is to start early, keep up a good pace, and get to our daily destination in the very early afternoon.  The afternoon temperatures next week are supposed to be in the low 100's. (40+ C.)

Spain is in the wrong time zone.  It should be in the same zone as Portugal and Britain, but the former dictator, Francisco Franco, wanted the country to be on the same time as his Axis buddies in Berlin and Rome.  Nobody ever changed it, so with daylight savings time, when your clock says noon, the actual geological time is 10 AM.  Two in the afternoon is really geological noon.  After two is just plain hot.

We left our hotel room in Logroño at 6:00 AM and walked alone through the city streets towards the edges of town.  We walked through parks, around a lake, and quickly into the Rioja vineyards which are everywhere.

Pilgrims have attached crosses to this fence overlooking a major highway.

This part’s for our California friends.  The vineyards here are fascinating.  Some are dry farmed.  Some have irrigation using sluice gates, the way they do in Mendoza, Argentina.  Some have drip irrigation along the ground.  Some have it above the ground, like back at home.  Some vines are trellised, and others look like bushes.  Some of those have the canes sprouting starting a few inches off the ground.  There are no rules.

We walked through vineyards for the better part of seven hours today.  We seldom ever saw more than one person working the vines.  Usually, we saw nobody at all.  Contrast that to how labor intensive California farming seems, and you wonder how the math works.

Outside Logroño, we saw an experimental state farm where they’re growing white Tempranillo.  Who knew that existed?

Me outside Navarette.  Before coffee.

Back to the walk.  It took us two hours and 45 minutes to get to the town of Navarette, where I finally had my morning cup of coffee in the tiny Plaza Mayor Alta outside their main church.  As we sat, our friends Tristan and Gregor from Germany and Antonio from Croatia joined us.  Afterwards, Tina and I went into the church to light a candle for her mother, and we were awed by the splendor of the place.  The classical music helped.  Check out this video.

Navarette was beautiful, but we pushed on... and on, walking through just countryside.  After about four hours, we took refuge under a tree with a young man, Ramon, from Belgium.  He started from France the day before us.  It became apparent that all the people walking around us were in his Camino cohort.  We drank water and shared the dried chorizo sausage that I’d been carrying since we started.  We all needed the energy. 

The Camino isn't always easy. Old roads and Roman roads can look like this.

At 1:20 PM, we arrived at Nájera.  This is a funny town.  You walk into the new half of the town and you’re unimpressed.  It’s modernish, it has stores, schools and people.  You cross the historic bridge over the rushing Najerilla river, and you enter the old town, where it seems like 25% of the buildings are for sale or just vacant.  It could be beautiful.  It’s not there yet.

Our albergue is wonderful, and all of our friends are here tonight.  It’s called Puerta de Nájera.  Note this: none of these places so far have had air conditioning, so your ability to sleep in a bunk bed with seven other people in the room is dependent upon how much it cools off outside and if there’s cross ventilation.  I have my fingers crossed!

So as I write this, we’re sitting in the shade in a park along the riverbank waiting for the weather to break.  We’re having a really nice bottle of reserve Rioja that cost me 7.65 Euros, and we’re planning tomorrow’s trek.

Our plan is to walk 30 kilometers in very high heat to a very special monastery in Grañón where for hundreds of years, they’ve taken in all pilgrims who knock at their door.  It’s supposed to be very special.  We’ll tell you about it–if they have WiFi!