Over the last 3 days, we’ve walked just over 70 kilometres from Puenta la Reina to Logroño. Yesterday’s walk was 27.8 kilometres, which was our longest so far. We’re sore but smug.

The last few days have involved:

Early starts

Church in the town of Puenta la Reina in the early morning with the moon behind

Lovely views

Bridge outside the town of Puenta la Reina, reflected in the river it crosses

Vineyards outside the town of Cirauqui

The Camino path in the area of Arcos, curvinf between fields with mountains in the distance

A stack of hay bales, lit yellow by the sun under a dark sky

A wine fountain

We stopped at what other hikers had been excitedly calling “the wall of wine”. It turns out that - in the grand tradition of pisshead monks - the Irache Monastery has an actual wine fountain that Camino pilgrims can drink from. There’s a water fountain too but no-one was very interested in that.

Roz drinking from the wine fountain

The sign above the fountain

The sign reads something like: “Pilgrim, if you want to get to Santiago full of strength and vitality, drink this great wine and make a toast to happiness.”

An accidental bull run in Viana

It’s hard to describe the speed with which we transitioned from knackered to eyes-wide-open alarm when we reached a town at the top of the hill only to be told that the bull running was about to start. Despite our abject terror and concern for the frightened bulls, we stayed long enough to see a bit of the action. The best bit was the people-watching rather than the bull-running though.

A local family watching the bulls run in the street below from their balcony

The balconies of two buildings on the bull run filled with all ages of locals watching

Nuts

A couple of days ago Tom got hit on the head by something falling from a tree. It looked a bit like a green fig but it wasn’t as heavy. City kids that we are, it took us a few conversations with other people to discover that it was an almond.

We made a few laboured jokes about Tom not knowing an almond if it hit him on the head and resolved to eat the next one we saw.

Here’s Tom cracking his nuts!