Life's a Stitch

Leaving Viana, we found a greeting from a local graffiti artist.

It was a very hot but short 2.5 hour walk through more vinyards into the lively city of Logrono.

Today it's about the food. Most restaurants offer a menu del dia, three courses with wine, ranging from 8-13e. The quality is definitely better toward the higher end.

Some towns only have one bar and the meals consist of a green salad with tuna and hard boiled egg or pasta for a starter, a choice of a baked chicken leg/thigh, pan fried pork or deep fried fish for a main.The side is always fries. Dessert is a commercial ice cream cone, yogurt or grocery store flan. A few days of that can get old so we've stepped up to 12e for dinner, if available, and have had wonderful fish, risotto, and Spain's huge white asparagus. Last night every table, whether one or two were seated, got an entire bottle of wine. It's a good thing we're walking all these miles.

We generally split one of our meals. Today's lunch was a hamburger with cheese, bacon and an egg. A half was plenty.

And this afternoon we shared something I've been anticipating, a regional favourite: chocolate with fresh made churro. The chocolate is thick like pudding. It was so rich we shared with another pilgrim sitting next to us.

We have to pick up our walking pace and have three long days ahead of us. We're also finding that on the weekends rooms are hard to get and we may face cabbing to the next village for a vacancy and cabbing back again in the morning to pick up where we left off.