April 30, 2023

Well I have had the full Camino experience of sleeping in albergues two nights in a row. There were 36 people in my dorm, and at 4:00 am some started to get up and pack their backpacks. I held off until 5:00, but by that time 90% of my roommates were on the move.  Well, except for the Italian guy in the bunk above me, he didn’t get back from the bars until 1:30 am so 4:00 am must have felt extra early for him.  I was out the door just before 6:00 and walking towards Viana. I took two pictures one looking east at the sun rising and one to the west.

There were a lot of pilgrims on the move, being a slow walker I get to greet many as they pass me. One young man stopped to offer me some strawberries from a bag he had purchased and washed. I asked for one, but he filled my hands and said he had too many to carry; the berries were great, properly allowed to vine ripen before picking.

I got to the first town of the day, Sansol, of course up on a hill. Most towns are up on hills so the attacking forces could be spotted long before arriving to start a siege.

It was pretty sleepy at that time of the morning, only thing open was a small “grocery store” that the owner put a table across the entrance to stop people from going in. I ordered a coffee, croissant and banana. This is where I met Gunther from Germany. He had injured his knee too, so we decided to walk together at our slow pace. He introduced me to a woman from Australia that made a short video to ask him about his knee. Later as we walked out of town he told me that he shared a room with her in an albergue the night before and that she snored so loud he had to put in his ear buds.

As you walk you come across all sorts of impromptu displays made by pilgrims. A common one is stacked rocks, but this one needed a picture as it was a rather large display.

One of the things on my list of things to see is the final resting place of Cesare Borgia, a particularly bad character from the renaissance period. His father was Pope Alexander VI and in his early teens he became a cardinal. At the time, he may have been the first person to abdicate his being cardinal in order to peruse his passion of war. He killed his older brother, seduced his teenage brother’s wife, and that is just the start. But probably didn’t do half the things his father did while on the papal throne. Eventually, his father died and he was fair game to everyone they had wronged. He ended up in Navarre where he was appreciated for his battle skills and he spent the balance of his life. When he died he was buried inside the Church of Santa María de la Asunción de Viana. But when a new bishop came to power, he moved the bones of Borgia from inside the church to the street in front of the church so that pilgrims would walk over him as punishment for killing the bishop’s father. In 2007 he was moved from the street to just outside the entrance of the church. It was too much of a story not to see his final place.

Viana is a great city that would be worthy of a longer visit.

After checking this off my list of to do’s, Gunther and I found a bar to get some pinchos for lunch, they actually don’t call them tapas here in this region of Spain. Somehow they are a different small plate of food. I personally like the pinchos name better the tapas.

In the foreground is a slice of French bread with a salad mixture of eggs, cheese, peppers, boiled potatoes and probably mayonnaise. The second plate was my favorite, on the bottom was a piece of tuna, half a hard boiled egg, white anchovy, pickled red onion, olives and olive oil. It was a pure protein snack, but I could tell Gunther didn’t like the looks of it. Gunther introduced me to another pilgrim from Germany, Heidi. So, her name isn’t Heidi, but she said her name so fast and did not speak English as well as Gunther.

Heidi had started 300 miles ago, at this point she has done 420 miles. After lunch it was 10K to Logrono, let’s say it was a long 10K. We arrived in the city, Gunther and I went our own ways, as we both had reservations at different hotels.

I was exhausted by the time I made it to my hotel, I took a long shower, washed my clothes and went out to find a pharmacy and dinner. I struck out on the pharmacy and as for food it was dinner in my room, trying to find something was difficult and as you can see it was total junk food. As I was out looking, I did see a number of restaurants and bars with outside seating, but they were all packed with patrons and I was just too tired to try and find a seat for one.

Tomorrow I will not be able to walk this type of distance again. My goal is Navarrete only 8 miles. Logrono’s part of the Camino is not well marked through the city. I decided to leave at 9:00 to make it easier to find the trail markers. My overall impression of Logrono is that it is my second largest city so far and that I didn’t like it, I wish I would have stayed in Viana.