Day 9: Logroño to Najera

Long stage again today. About 30km. Set off early but got a little bit lost coming out of the city and then I wasted a lot of our time looking for a bathroom when we came out of the city and into one of the amenity parks... Anyway, we got over it and we were in good form. It felt like we were getting into it today. We decided a few days ago to turn off all the phones and watches because we used to be trying to time our breaks, or try and calculate how fast we were travelling. After what felt like a good few kms in we saw a village and we decided to stop for coffee but the next thing, the yellow arrows - that we are following all through the Camino, pointed a different so we followed on, as per usual and ages later arrived at a very similar looking village to the one that had seemed very close earlier. One of our Spanish buddies informed us that yes, it was the same village and the Camino, just for fun, had taken us an extra 4kms out of our way to get there. But in our now Zen-like state, we accepted this fact and with our feet burning, we went in to get a coke. We walked on after our pitstop with the Spanaird, and got the complete history of Spain, Franco and the Basque country (from the point of view of a Madrileño - person who lives in Madrid) for about 10 km and it was really interesting because up to this point, we had been walking through the Basque Country (which is a region in Spain that wants to be independent and they had their own type of IRA called ETA but there is now a ceasefire) and had seen all the flags, and the banners written in Euskera and the graffiti on the pilgrim path with "Freedom for the Basque" and "Pilgrim (bit Wild West, like), You are in the Basque Country." It is still quite polemic here, I didn´t really that it was still so contraversial. But then, Franco only died in the 70s and before that they had a dictatorship for 40 years... Very interesting. We took a little break then and the last 2km into the city were AWFUL. I seriously thought we were getting sunstroke! I was there with my cap on, and a scarf draped over it and Maura was going around with my fleece draped over her - just anything to avoid our skin being touched by the sun!! Made it eventually...drunk on sunshine...