Episode Transcript
DAY 7 MORNING BEFORE WALKING
It’s the morning of Day 7, leaving Sansol. Very, very hot again last night, but we both medicated ourselves slightly. I slept like a rock, which is great, so I feel much better this morning than yesterday. That's good. Yeah, I feel fine as well. A little bit shorter days today because we walked to Sansol yesterday. So once we get going then hopefully we're a bit under 20 kilometers to go. It's really, really hot again, so better make a move. Heading to Logrono, right? Heading to Logrono. Cool.
DAY 7 SUMMARY
Hi everyone, and welcome to Is This The Way, a podcast where we walk the Camino de Santiago. I'm Francesca. And I'm Gaven.
It's day seven and we are one week into the Camino and somehow still alive despite the heat wave. It's funny, even after a week, actually, even after a few days, you feel like you've been doing it forever. Certainly after a week you feel like you've been walking for a long time, I think. And this is just the new normal now. Yeah, I think I say it later, but it's kind of like, at the start, you feel like it's never going to end. In the middle, you're like, it's never gonna end. And then suddenly it's over and you're just like, wait, where'd that come from? Yeah, but your feet thank you for it at the end, though. True.
So as you heard yesterday, we're absolutely sweltering in Sansol during the heat wave and headed off very early to Logrono. And we had a shorter day because we went a little bit further the day before to reach Sansol. So we only had a relatively short day today. The guidebook says 20.8 kilometers, we're about 21 kilometers to get to Logrono. So that's about right.
It rates it a two out of three difficulty. I think it probably put it about a four out of 10. It wasn't a particularly difficult day, but then we did have that little bit of head start over people. Yeah, exactly. So I think because we had a shorter day, it was pretty fine for us. Yeah, I don't remember it being a very difficult day at all. I remember being quite pleasant. And then as you kind of get to Logrona as well, I think we kind of come along the river a little bit and cross over the river, it was all quite a pleasant day really.
Well, quoting from the guidebook, it says “wander through vineyards and fields of golden wheat, visit medieval villages and sample the wine of La Rioja.” We definitely sampled the wine and we did start to see vineyards along the way. So went from the odd vines randomly placed in scrappy and small lots, to much more structured kind of vineyards as we're getting into this area. As we get to Lagrono, we leave the Navarra region and actually reach the La Rioja region. Yeah, exactly. So this is one of – as we've mentioned at the start, you walk through these different autonomous regions of Spain. So this is the second of maybe five or six that you walk through on the Camino, the La Rioja region. And hopefully you know it's predominately known for wine, particularly red wine. Apparently 85% of the grapes that they produce are red wine grapes. And as we found out and it's very, very important to know this, there are four classifications. Do you remember what the four classifications are? God no!
So Rioja is the youngest and aged less than one year. Crianza is aged at least two years and at least one in oak barrels, and this is one that we tended to try and get above the previous one. Rioja Reserva is at least three years, and Rioja Grande Reserva is at least two years in oak and three years in the bottle, at least five years old. So we should go for the Grande wine. So I think we probably sampled all of them and then maybe realized that Crianza was a pretty decent kind of cost to taste. Yeah, it's funny I've completely forgotten that. Well we remember now. Yeah, now I remember. The region is also known for lots of chorizo sausages, spicy sausages and slices of young lamb roasted over a fire or cordero lechel. I don't remember having slices of lamb anywhere or seeing anyone roasting slices of lamb over a fire or seeing roasted slices of lamb on any menus. I guess we weren't paying attention. We're also very briefly in this region. I think we're only in it for a day. And then we cross over into the next autonomous region. Yeah, a couple of days, I think, walking through this area, yeah. But yeah, lamb wasn't something I noticed, but that would have been tasty if we'd found some. I'm sure there's some around.
Then as we mentioned, we enter Logrono, which is the capital of the La Rioja region. And it was such a lovely city, town, whatever you want to call it – a large town, yeah. No, it was very pretty town. Nice squares, a little bit of greenery, some nice restaurants and cafes and things around. Very pleasant to wander about. Because the town was a bit larger, we were able to stay in a nice hotel with air con, which was amazing. So it's the Eurostars Hotel. And then the lady recommended this Basque restaurant, which we'll bookmark, just around the corner. And we ended up eating all of our meals there because the food was so delicious. Yeah, really tasty food and friendly service as well. And nice outdoor seating in the shade. Yeah, it was overlooking the big cathedral, off the side a little bit, looking the side wall of the cathedral, because the ones on the end that look at a big outdoor retablo on the end were all rammed and not so pleasant.
And apparently there's an area, a nightlife zone, with 60 bars and restaurants known as the Elephant Walk, because something wine in too many of those means that you basically come out walking on all fours. I mean, to be fair, we sample plenty of wine at one place, but I think I stumbled time on two feet. Just about.
As we mentioned in the afternoon, the lady at the hotel recommended this DellaSera ice cream shop, which apparently had the best ice cream in Spain. We even have a little video of you tasting it for the first time, which I'm sure you'll post up on our Facebook page. Maybe… We'll see. Well, of you're looking pretty unenamoured by your ice cream being exhausted with a face full of ice cream, yeah, I don't know how much people need to see that. We'll see.
But yeah, that's also probably a point that we have a Facebook page, it's a little bit old school called Is This The Way, and you can see images of our journey and you put a blog up there, got a bit of discourse going, which is great. And yeah, feel free to post any questions or anything, and we'll come to those in the next few episodes when the walk starts to become a little bit monotonous, and then we'll end up talking about a whole bunch of other things. Yeah, there's links to the Facebook page from the top of our website: isthistheway.net, you can just click through and it's got that bit of extra information on there. We've had our first troll, and had lots of great, lovely people commenting. It's been quite fun to engage with people and talk about the Camino.
Logrono is a very pleasant town. It was nice to have a comfortable room with a big modern bathroom and air conditioning. That was very pleasant after a few very warm days. Definitely worth the splurge there.
Well, let's see how we got on. Yeah, let's find out.
DAY 7 AFTERNOON AFTER WALKING
It's Day Seven afternoon. We are sitting in a cafe in Logrono. We had lunch here as well and then walked around and ended up back at the same place because, one, it's in the shade, two, it's quiet, and three, they actually serve you. And it's delicious food and delicious wine. So we entered the well, OK, I'm gonna say “Rioca” region, but we were looking at pronunciations, it may be Rioja, maybe something else. Yeah, but anyone who's from the UK will know “Rioca” wine and it was €2.00 a glass and just so delicious and so definitely enjoying sitting here.
Yeah, it was really nice and it is a little bit cooler sitting here in some shade and a little bit of breeze. Even if it's hot breeze, at least the air is moving around so it's only a little bit better than yesterday, which was just blazing heat and completely still. Yeah, and I mean I think we've benefited from checking into actually a room which has aircon and it makes such a difference we almost get disorientated because I'm so used to being so hot that I'm sticking to everything that I don't know what it's like to feel normal in air con again.
I'm kind of used to being in like either older buildings, it'd be an apartments or the albergues or whatever. It's older rooms, older buildings, big thick stone walls, and now you're back in like a modern hotel for the night it feels a little bit weird. It almost feels like a regular holiday versus being on the Camino. Yeah, exactly. I think particularly because I would definitely say Logrono, I'm a big, big fan of this town. It's a bit posh. Everything's quite nice. It's very, very pleasant. Lots of nice green parks and cafes and everything. Of the larger towns we've been to, this had the best feel so far. But then I think from the Camino perspective, my favorite places have been the really small towns where there's literally nothing there except, you know, the albergue where you're spending the night like last night. I like the really small towns, like when there's just like a a cafe or a store that's doing like coffee and some drinks and things that you could sit in the shade and have that. And maybe that's the only thing there aside from where you're staying. And those little towns, you feel like you're a little bit more away from everything, which is nice. But I think we've lucked out making the choice to stop in some of the bigger towns as well because there is a heat wave. It is crazy hot, and in the bigger towns we've tended to get hotel rooms to treat ourselves a little bit in between. And that might just work out really well given the temperatures at the moment because I'll generally have air conditioning.
Didn't you say it was 43 degrees today? Yeah, apparently a top of 43 today. It was definitely hotter this morning than it normally is in the morning. Mornings have been quite cool generally. This morning when we set out at like, 7.30am, it was already warm and we were sweating within a few minutes, so it was definitely hot again in the morning. But I think because we had a shorter day because we did more kilometers yesterday, we got into town a little bit earlier here and we managed to be out of the heat for the worst of it in the afternoon. Because yesterday it was like the last couple of kilometres were actually walking along the tarmac road as well, with no shade in the heat. In like 40 plus degrees. It was brutal. And then it was not a smart thing to do.
I mean, our day was, other than sweating constantly, it was a pretty chilled walk actually. It was our shortest day so far, I think. Yeah, it's like 21km, so it's about the same as our walking to Pamplona. But it felt much easier, basically, and I don't know if that's a bit of conditioning or if it was just an easier walk. But definitely we we walked a bit faster and it felt a lot easier today. It really wasn't a difficult day. A couple of very pleasant stops as well. So there was this Viana, there's lovely shady little streets with just chairs and like little coffee shops on the side of the path where you can sit and rest your feet and have like a cortado for a little while. So yeah, I think I mean as a result it was just a relatively relaxed day.
That was our brunch stop, because we had we normally try and stop at around at the first town, which is normally 3 to 5 kilometres, sometimes a little bit more into your morning, so then you've done a little bit of walking and you can stop and have breakfast. But today the first town was 800 metres away. Because Sansol and Torres Del Rio are twinned towns with a little bit of road in between them. And there was a coffee shop just there. And then we thought the next one was about 3 kilometres on. Which was wrong, because the next one wasn't a town, it was just a lookout on the top of a mountain, wasn't it? Yeah, it was like an Alto de Poyo or something – we think Altos are like hills and we went up a bit of a hill. Isn’t pollo Chicken? I think so. It was Poyo, so I don't know if that's the same. Probably not, but it's pronounced the same. Yeah, the hill of the chicken was deceptive and did not have a coffee shop. No, nor a chicken on it.
There was like a few notable kind of things. Each day you seem to find something slightly different, for the senses. And we saw this monk, we've seen him a few times actually, but again, like the monk walking in his full robes, which is just incredible in the baking heat, and he's wearing sandals as well, and he's been kept up with us the whole time. So I'm just so impressed every time I see him, how well he's doing. And then we walk through what this bit that smelled like maple syrup, I don't know what that was all about. It made me want pancakes. Maybe we were near the Mondeley factory at that point? No we were out in the middle of nothing and then suddenly it's not really strongly like maple syrup. It was bizarre.
And we walked through one of the shady spots, this guy taking his guitar out, he was playing the Hallelujah song that I know from The OC. You said you know it from somewhere else? It was from Shrek that I know it. It’s nice to see, hear, smell these random things each day. And we also got a stamp from this lady on the way into Logrono, who apparently is part of this dynasty of stamp givers. So she has her table set up and she was saying that her mother, her grandmother and her great grandmother were all manning this table at one point in the past. So there's a little memorial sign to the great great grandmother. She was born in 1910. So it's literally 100 years about of them providing these stamps, which is really lovely. Figs, water and love is the motto. Yeah, we saw the fig trees that they're outside the house as well. Unfortunately, a little bit early in the year you could see the figs growing. I presume when they're in season you can either buy or they give away free, which would be nice. It's definitely an incentive for doing this a bit later in the year, including having some more ripe fruit around because there are all these like incredible vines of grapes on them, but they're all too small to taste, unfortunately. They look pretty, huge clusters of grapes. Yeah, and grapevines as far as you could see on both sides of the road coming into town.
Those were some of the highlights. I think we're about to try the supposedly the best helados in known universe according to our hotel reception. So we'll see if that's accurate or not. But actually, the other thing was we walked past that cemetery and there was a nice quote that you had that you saw:
“What you are, I once was. What I am, you will be.”
That's quite profound, isn't it? I guess we all kind of know that. Yeah, we know it. But I guess when you see it on a grave. I like that quote for sure.
I guess the only other thing I was sort of thinking about today a little bit was we've really stripped life back into like the most simplest of elements, walking, eating, sleeping. Repeat. But I guess it's something that, how long would that like satisfy you for? Probably not forever. It’s certainly satisfying me at the moment, I'm really enjoying it. I guess it's not practical to live that way indefinitely. It’s not something I want to do forever in this. It does make you think about how you could live a simpler life, and prioritize different things? And it's brilliant for now. I think it's certainly something that we would do again in the future as well. I think a lot of this from not shipping big bags ahead and then having suitcases arrive at each stop for you and some of the conveniences that are there. By just having to carry everything that you have for these six weeks, you realize that that's pretty much everything that you need to live. I think so. I've had to make a few sacrifices. Like my hair is so tangled and bedraggled. Other than that, really not much. We've left behind like a lot of stuff, supplements and vitamins and things like that that we're taking. We just don't take. And I've been fine.
I've been feeling better than I have for a while. We normally get headaches all the time. One or the other of us will always have a headache. And we haven't had any while we've been on this. So I think health wise, like I'm feeling so much better than I have in a long time by doing this. It just shows you how much stress can cause, like tension can cause headaches and things like stress and then just the way that we live our lives, sitting at a desk all day and all that sort of thing. We're now on our feet all the time. It's just totally different, I guess. It's like the way that we were supposed to live. Whereas here you literally need to walk to the next town, find some dinner, which is obviously quite relaxing. Yeah, like you say, neither of us in a week now have had any headaches or anything like that. And we probably should have, considering we've been dehydrated we've been walking through a heat wave, we're carrying heavy backpacks every day, and both of us get like headaches from like, shoulder, shoulder and neck pain and things like that. So the fact that we're walking seven days lugging our bags in crazy heat, we’re not really conditioned for doing everyday long walking, so you are getting just tired as well. We're completely fine and actually feeling like a lot better than what we were. We're seven days in now and I just can't wait for the rest of it. I'm really, really enjoying it.
Now we should go and get ice cream, though, because it's hot. Yeah, I'm sticking to the chair, so it's time to go. We're going to go and get the best ice cream or helados in the known universe, according to our hotel reception. All right.
OUTRO
Thanks everyone for listening.
We hope you've enjoyed Is This The Way and have taken away some inspiration and ideas about how you might approach the Camino. If you'd like to get in touch or find some more information about each episode, head over to our website: https://isthistheway.net.
Buen Camino!
