Day 9: 8/5/09 Viana to Navarrete

• Hannah´s backpack & the bread stick poking out the top makes her look like Star War´s Bobba Fett.
• Passing through the endless vinyards all day. The vines are generally not grown on wires like in Aus -- they seem to be cut down to stumps & regrown each year.
• It turns out that it´s Friday (we´d lost track). We followed a popular walking path through Logroño for several kilometers. Perhaps unsurprisingly for being along a pilgrim route, the Spanish seem to have an active walking culture. For the number of people out walking, we´d initially thought it was the weekened.
• We arrived in Navarrete just before noon, and already there were about 16 people waiting at the albergue. The convention is to place backpacks in a queue so that it´s first come, first served (or bedded, as the case may be).
• We had our first negative experience today. The albergue manager upset quite a few people by having them wait for several hours... only to tell them that there were no more beds. Then he´d let a few more in... then he´d arbitrarily turn people away again. We found out the following day that he ended up turning away an 83 year old man at 8:00pm, making him walk an extra 6kms to the next town. A few people are going to report him to the authorities. Not that it matters, but he wasn´t Spanish. I haven´t yet met a single Spanish person that hasn´t been more than willing to go out of their way to help pilgrims. We once had a car pull up blocking all traffic for several minutes while giving directions. Road works had diverted the normal path, and there was aaaaaaabsolutely no way they were going to let us get lost. Other people have stories of locals walking kilometers out of their way to ensure pilrims got to their destinations.
• We were over eating out at restaurants and were craving a homecooked meal with a good dose of veggies, so we spent 20€ in the local supermarket and bought enough to over-feed half the albergue. That´ll keep the scurvey away for a few more days!
• There´s supposed to be a storm overnight. The wet & cold don´t come in through our clothes, so I´m almost hoping the rain will continue until tomorow. In a few more days we´ll hit the open flats of the meseta where there´s very little variation, so it´ll be good to mix it up a little first. :)
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