And all of a sudden I´ve been at this for a whole week! Seven days and seven stages of the Camino come and gone, crazy thought. It´s really interesting how quickly you get used to some things. A few days ago getting up so early, walking 15 miles and going from place to place day after day was very challenging, but now after so much time on the road my body has gotten used to things more or less. Hitting the 100 kilometer mark had a big psychological effect I think, once I got over that milestone everything got a lot easier. The pain has (inevitably) spread to my right knee, but it´s sort of a baseline thing nowadays--something that´s always there and just a little annoying instead of something that has me hobbled on the side of the trail grabbing my legs in pain as pilgrims 20 years my senior pass me by. Stairs are still my greatest enemy, and I absolutely loathe the sight of them, but the constant walking on the trails isn´t half as bad as it used to be. The feet are ok: always tight and a little tender, but the pain isn´t too bad, nor are the blisters really giving me a lot of trouble.
Today´s stop is Viana, an incredible little town in between Torres del Rio and Logroño. My goal today was initially Logroño, 29 kilometers away from Los Arcos, where I had spent the previous night. A lot of the fellow pilgrims I´m walking with were headed there, and after having looked at and consulted my guidebook a bunch I figured Logroño would make the most sense in terms of distributing out the distances between cities. But I got to Viana this afternoon around 1:00 and was just blown away, which got me to thinking that I should just stay here. One thing about the Camino is that it takes you through some kind of crappy backwater places sometimes, and on some days the towns have been a little underwhelming. After a little thought, I figured I would just stay here and enjoy myself since the energy of this place spoke so much to me. I´m behind schedule as it is in terms of finishing on time, and will have to take a bus at some point to make up for lost kilometers (probably through the Meseta section, which is a little barren and boring as I understand), so I figure I´ll just let myself move along as I please and see what I want to see. Every travel writer I´ve ever read always complains about how the travel schedules they have to keep really get in the way of them having fun, which was kind of the case with me when I was in the UK with those absolutely insane train days, so I´ll try to avoid that as best I can.
I´ve really been speaking a lot of German in the past few days, which is just awesome. I stayed at an Austrian-run hostel last night, which was of course full of German speakers, so I got to meet and greet a lot of the Germans and Austrians that are on the path with me. I spent the first couple hours this morning walking and chatting with a couple of the Austrian students I met a couple days ago, which was a lot of fun. I´ve always liked the accent (very different from the High German I was speaking and hearing up in Hamburg), and have noticed a big improvement in my fluency from having spoken the language so much. It´s a globalized world nowadays I guess--you come to Spain and end up speaking German the whole day. I´m not complaining anyway; it´s always a blessing meeting German speakers who actually want to speak German with you.
The past few stops have been: Estella, Los Arcos, and Viana today. Estella was ok--ít´s reedeming quality was the albergue I stayed in, which was really nice after an INCREDIBLY hot and dusty day of walking, plus a lot of the pilgrims I´ve befriended along the way ended up staying there too. Los Arcos was nice. It was also a hot and dusty day to get there, but not so bad as Puente la Reina to Estella, and the pilgrim´s menu I found there was really excellent, and that was also where the Austrian albergue was.
Tomorrow´s stop will ideally be Ventosa, but I may just end up stopping in Navarrete, about 7 kilometers closer. We´ll see I guess! Until then.
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