Day 25 & 26

Casita Lucia came as a complete surprise. I had slept outside in a field again: just like the night before, I couldn’t make myself stay at a place where people had gathered to enjoy themselves, relax, sleep next to each other. The man responsible for the Palacio de Sansol I entered to ask if there was a bed available tried to persuade me to stay, to join the group who had just finished their dinner, to make friends. My future friends were already firing questions at me, the usual ones: where do you come from, how long have you been walking, and when I asked for a few minutes to make up my mind they seemed offended, the man in charge told me he had to call somebody now to confirm I was going to stay there, “You can’t leave!” He said. “All you need is here, food, company, good conversation, friendship.” And those are indeed things I need, but at that moment I just needed a little bit of silence and the possibility to join people if I wanted to but not an expectation to be part of a group. And so I woke up again under an open sky, feeling a bit rough but also quite happy. The next village, Viana, was 8 kilometre away and I was looking forward to a cup of coffee in 2 hours. But like a fata morgana Casita Lucia materialised in the middle of nature, a little wooden bar next to the walking trail with a terrace occupied by a family of robins. People came and went and I found myself moving from one conversation to the other, with a local wine producer who came to bring some vegetables, a neighbour who passed by for a coffee, a group of Italians who sang along with the music coming out of the car parked next to the casita, two girls who left me a question to embroider on my suit (how much is enough?), a French drummer, and the owner who supplied me with more coffee, fresh orange juice, sweet bread and when morning turned into afternoon, tortilla and a beer. I exchanged phone numbers with some people and danced a tango with one of the Italians. Food, company, good conversation, friendship, all I needed. When I left, José, the kind owner, invited me to stay in his house in Viana and I happily accepted. In the evening he told me about the history of Casa Lucia, how he had spend most of his life working hard in a job he didn’t particularly like and how he sometimes went to his favorite place in nature during his lunch breaks to find some peace of mind. After he retired, together with a friend, he decided to turn his favorite place into a little haven for walkers and since 5 years he went there every day from 6 am to 2 pm from early spring to november and felt happier than he ever had been.
The next morning, when he was off to make orange juice and coffee for thirsty pilgrims, I explored Viana. The evening before I had already noticed all the big red wooden gates in every street in the centre of town and the open air bull ring on the central square surrounded by platforms to give an audience a good view of the spectacle, but only now I realised that the gates were meant to close off the streets so animals could be chased from one end of town to the other. The woman in the information office told me proudly that it was still happening twice a year and when she noticed my lack of enthusiasm she said the conditions for the animals here were not as bad as in Pamplona. Not as bad, exactly.
José sent me off with a bag filled with tasty things, I followed the road to Logroño through vineyards, this was Rioja territory. At some point a big car stopped next to me and a man who resembled a sherif from a western movie opened his window to tell me it was only 6 more minutes walking to a fountain. I suspected him of really stopping to check what I was eating, when he asked I showed him my hand filled with blackberries, not grapes. He drove on and I saw him again later, after I had passed the fountain and a mysterious mural resembling a Hieronymus Bosch painting, driving in the opposite direction.
The village of La Rioja mainly consisted of grape processing facilities and I passed it from a distance, not really tempted to make a detour. A simple sign asked for a cruel event to be remembered so history would not repeat itself, “los pueblos que olvidan su historia están condenados a repetirla”. At the exact spot where the little none-monument was placed, on the 3d of September 1936, 27 people from the nearby villages of Ábalos and San Vicente de la Sonsierra were murdered, victims of the Franco regime. I wondered how many pilgrims stopped here for a moment to give it their attention.
Dona Elvira - as the tiles next to the door of the cute little house read - was clearly tired of pilgrims knocking on the door to ask for a stamp in their pilgrim passport and had put a sign on a table that could be read from a distance, “SELLO NO”, but the man living a few houses away was sitting at a table in front of his house with no other apparent reason than welcoming everybody and stamping their credentials. His wife was sitting on a bench knitting and she waved at me. “Bienvenido a Logroño!”