Day 8 – El Camino – Los Arcos to Logroño

Los Arcos to Logroño, after a satisfying dinner and rest in the hostel, I felt i could retake the route. Aaron also retook the route with us.

We started walking at 7h00 and headed towards the first town. We estimated that it would be around six or seven kilometers there. Our pace was fairly stable, making around five or six kilometers per hour. I had no trouble in my ankle for the most part.

About five kilometers in, I felt the sharp pain shoot up my achilles’ tendon. This was a signal for me to take it easy.

We arrived at the first town and had a short break. Matt gave out the hard boiled eggs we prepared the night before.

As we resumed our walk, Aaron and I decided to catch a bus to Logroño to save our feet and give ourselves a rest day. Matt and Sam were fifty meters ahead of us, I called out ‘hey guys, we are catching the bus.’ It must have been fate, as one second later a bus pulled up from around the corner.

Aaron and I ran as fast as our sore feet could take us and quickly boarded the bus. It took another thirty minutes to reach Logroño.

We descended the bus at the terminus and headed to a bar for wifi. We bought ourselves beers and I asked for the wifi password. We spent the next hour trying to decipher if the password was in all caps or in lowercase.

I guess the exhaustion of the previous walk days had caught up to me, as I nodded off to sleep in the bar. We decided to keep moving.

At the next cafe we were able to connect to wifi properly. We spent the next few hours there waiting for our companions to arrive.

They arrived just after 13h00 and we joined them at the bar in Plaza del Mercado. Our hostel was just around the corner from there and we checked in.

The host was there trying to answer a pilgrims question. He asked me if I knew what they were asking, I said I speak French so we communicated that way. In the end we got the answer they needed. It’s kind of funny that I can still use my French here in Spain.

The hostel had a nice courtyard with a small fountain in the middle. I could have dipped my feet in the cool water.

We went out for dinner and met up with the other Australians at a bar. There we had three pints and the barman brought our heaps of chips, olives and munchies for us.

Sam wanted to eat Paella, so we went walking around to find somewhere cheap. We circled the main drag and I found a bar that could serve us a paella and beer each for 6€50. Cheap! But it wasn’t that great. Matt and Sam both had a piece of meat in their paella, but Aaron and I mostly had rice.

A lovely Colombian couple at the table next to us noticed that we were Camino Pilgrims. I had a conversation with them with my best Spanish, making up words from the French equivalent.

I was fairly intoxicated when we arrived back at the hostel so I slept well.