Walked another 32 kilometres today, from Estella to Torres del Rio. Making a total of 796 kilometres. Finished my fourth week of walking. Slowed down a little bit, but the average is still close to 29 kilometres a day.
Weatherwoman Julie could not have been more wrong when she announced a beautiful day after her first cigarette. ‘Not a cloud in the sky!’ But they came fast those clouds, and before the morning was over a steady and dreadful rain poured down over us.
It still was beautiful. The landscape has changed after Pamplona. Instead of the impressive scenery of the outskirts of the Pyrenees, the hills are less imposing in this area. Today we walked almost all day in an agricultural area between to lower mountain ridges. The fields of grass and beans looked almost surreal bright green and seemed to be freshly washed by the rain.
It all had the character of a Japanese rock garden, where the forms of the rake were simulated by the tracks of large farm machines. The clearcut edges of the fields meandered around the rocky hills in the distance. This was all accentuated by the stringent rows of freshly trimmed vines, all neatly attached to their wires that train them.
When strolling through Estella this morning, Frank showed up. He must have had an early start I thought, but all the peregrino hostels between Lorca and Estella had been closed, he said. So he had been forced to walk to Estella too.
We had a good time together, slowly revealing a little more of each others backgrounds. We shared the disappointment of the empty wine fountain at the Irache bodega, just outside Estella. Each day the winemakers offer some free wine to pilgrims, but I’ve read that the local drunks take advantage of this generosity, and most pilgrims don’t get a taste of the wine. But then, drinking wine at 10AM might not be a very good idea after all.
Talking about drunks. At Llarasoane a few days ago a pilgrim annex alcoholic was thrown out of the local hostal by a Spanish woman. She did this so efficiently and relentlessly that I was sorry for her husband at home. When he arrived at the hostal at 2 PM he was drunk. In fact he looked like he had been drunk for the last fourteen years. He sat outside the hostal for a while, efficiently uncorking the three bottles of wine he had up his sleeves. ‘That is how alcoholics steal their wine’, New Zealand Bruce told me.
Today when I left Frank in Los Arcos – I’ll probably see him again tomorrow – this same drunk wished me a ‘Buen Camino’ from a sheltered place around the village square, where he was neatly nestled with a bottle of wine and a big can of beer. How the hell did he get here, I wondered. I have walked pretty thoroughly in the past days, on a pace that he cannot follow for three minutes I would guess. But then I remembered someone said that he takes taxi’s most of the time. And his real destination isn’t Santiago, but Rome. But then, all roads lead to Rome as we Catholics know. Mine will go through Santiago first though, still 631 kilometres from here.
PS I forgot to tell the wonderful experience of watching the Real Madrid-Barcelona game on a large tv in the Camping canteen. Great fun. Barca won: 3-4.
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