"I´m out here a thousand miles from my home
Walking a road other men have gone down
I´m seeing your world of people and things
of paupers and poets and princes and kings
Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie I wrote you a song
´bout a funny old world that´s a-coming along
seems sick and it´s hungry, it´s tired and it´s torn
it looks like it´s a-dying and it´s hardly been born"
-Bob Dylan
30km. I didn´t think I could do it, not on a train, not on a plane, not in a box, not with a fox. But I did. In the pouring rain no less. The path from Logroño to here passes through many a-vineyard, which are very fine and pretty in the sunshine, very scenic under cloudy skies, and a veritable swamp when it´s raining. The mud sticks to the boots like glue, which slips off the mud on the ground like grease. Half the time I was fighting to stay on my feet, never mind moving forward. I actually stopped to laugh later on in the day at the sheer idiocy of my situation (well, I stopped for a smoke and ended up laughing - semantics) : out in the middle of nowhere, soaked to the bone, trying to get from point A to point B the hard way. Not to mention the fact that with my tan pants, blue shirt, white hat and rain poncho, I was the very image of Juan Valdez. Still, it´s something I was almost certain I couldn´t pull off, and I did. Tomorrow´s a much lighter day, with only 22km seperating me and Santo Domingo de la Calzada. Should be a cakewalk after today.
A word about why I chose to do 30km today. Bottom line is that I wanted to put as much distance between myself and Logroño as possible. My first impression of Logroño was that it was a miserable little town inhabited by miserable people. After a bit of a rest, I deceided that I hadn´t been fair. I was a miserable sod when I walked into town so that probably colored my impressions. After a day or so, I decided that no, I was right - these were, in fact, miserable people. Didn´t enjoy the town or the people in the least. I don´t know; Maybe they´re tired of dealing with brown people (which, admittedly they had more of then say, Pamplona), maybe I caught them on a bad week, or (my favorite theory) maybe they´re just dicks. It happens. They seemed to brighten up a bit towards the end of my stay there when the rain started falling. But that could have just been me enjoying watching them get rained on. Either way, my last hours in Logroño were my favorite.
I'm on schedule to hit Burgos in a couple of days. Burgos is the convenient delination point between this hilly wine country and the part of Spain known as the Meseta - which is flat as a pancake, and from what I hear, about as interesting. It´s the kind of landscape where you could open your back door and watch for three days as the dog runs away. 300km or so of that, which shouldn´t be too too bad, considering the Camino through there is flat, straight, and reasonably well maintained. After that, the Cordillera Cantabrica looms. That´ll be the real test. But that´s not for a couple of weeks yet.
Later all,
-Juan O.
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