Logrono to Najera

Leaving the albergue I was determined not to carry the funk for the next 29km. I did that insane yet effective thing where you reverse engineer a smile. You grin until the muscles send a message to the brain that there must be something to be happy about? I think that's how it works. It did, anyway.

On the way out of Logrono I saw a black cat, and eagerly knelt down next to it, to love it. When I tried to stand up, my legs didn't have enough warning, and I fell down and nearly headbutted a hole in the poor thing. That had me laughing. Probably also helped that it was sunny, nobody bothered me, and I was generous with the stops.

We are definitely in wine country, and I was grateful for the dry given this thick red dirt apparently makes for ruinous mud. I've downloaded the Buen Camino app, basically google maps but with one yellow line and the albergues on it, and it's making navigation easier in spots that would have given me trouble before.

I took a two kilometre, largely WC-motivated, detour via a little town at the 18km mark, and on leaving was mobbed by a bunch of small girls - I'm really awful with estimating the age of children from when they can sit unaided to when they enter high school, but I'll guess they were eight. They held a tacklebox full of rubber-band accessories like it was the holy grail, and reverentially took me through their wares.

The sad thing is that you sort of harden yourself to scams over the years and I initially tried to disengage before realising no, these were just kids that probably spent recess crafting and were now on the scrounge for pocket money.

I knelt again, sincerely hoping I'd be able to get up afterwards, and together we had a serious think about what I could buy with 40 cents. This ended up being decided by committee, and I think my new ring goes very nicely with the others. It's not about the ring of course, it's about holding space for girly nonsense, which I happen to thing is one of the most sacred things in the world.Read more