Day 10 - Logroño to Najera (30km)

Today was another long walk of nearly 30 kilometres to Najera and so another 6.30am start. In terms of scenery it was not the best of days: a long and stony road through the vineyards of La Rioja and never that far away from the main road between Logroño and Najera, glimpsed occasionally through the rolling hillside. But in terms of entertainment we had a blast. I walked the whole day with Janna and Robin and we passed the time with 'Desert Island Discs'. First I needed to explain the whole idea to a Canadian and American who clearly come from a cultural wasteland but once that was out of the way it was a case of, one by one, stating your record, why it was significant to you, and of course singing it to the other two.....We passed the time singing (after a fashion) and laughing. ‘Singing in the Rain' never came up despite how fitting it would have been at some points of the day.

                      

The Camino decided that it would bowl a curved ball at us today. As with many long distance walks the Camino provides an onward service for bags: suitably labelled baggage is left in the morning at your hostel and is ready waiting for you at the next when you arrive later in the day. I do not use the service myself - it leaves me total freedom as to where I might end up each day - but my traveling companions do and normally it goes without a hitch. But today no rucksacks awaited them. After a few phone calls in my rather rusty Spanish it was established that they were still in the previous hostel and the mistake seemed to be theirs so it was arranged to collect them by taxi later in the day. Janna went, joined by me as translator, only to find that somehow the hostel owner had since got them shipped to our destination after the main run had arrived. It was all very confusing and definitely things had been lost in translation. It also felt strange to be moving by means other than my own effort and to watch a landscape that I had spent the last few hours walking through slip past the taxi window; there was a sense that those rolling fields and that tilled earth, the countryside of rural Spain, was where I now belonged and now here I was in the wrong place, some dislocated and detached observer. Ten days of walking has clearly had an impact.

Baggage problems resolved and back at Najera I spent the evening with my walking colleagues, catching up with Rob and Greg - the other two Canadians - and meeting a few new faces while of course making the most of the wine this region has to offer