18th of August Robert wanted to send a package back home with all the maps from France and the Pyrenees as we wouldn’t need them anymore. It was a bit like we had preached to the Taiwanese girl to send the unnecessary stuff by mail to follow the motto: “ less-is-more”. Robert was able to get rid of 1 kilo of weight – not personally but at least out of his bike bags. At the post office Robert had to get a number and wait in line while I was waiting outside where it started to rain. It was not a lot of rain, but it must have been either Sahara sand or ashes from the forest fires in the west as it left greasy brown stains all over. It took more than 45 minutes until Robert finally was able to send his package.
So we left Pamplona extremely late following the camino over the university campus out of town, finding ourselves caught with pilgrims in between road constructions. Finally the city with huge apartement buildings ended and a hilly landscape was rising to the west with windmills at the horizon. We met again and again pilgrims and even faces who we got to meet days ago in Roncesvalles like Theodore from San Diego. We got involved into short talks with pilgrims like two bikers from France who were on their way back and had experienced that the camino was even closed due to the fires. They had to pack their bikes into boxes and put them into the bus to get transported around the affected areas.
No good news, but we were still far away from that area. We could already seeon satellite pictures how far the smoke clouds were reaching out into the Atlantic Ocean and even to France.
At the village of Zariquiegui we had a little stop for a snack and tried to follow the pilgrim’s path but it was way too steep for us. So we had to make a huge detour crossing the highway to avoid the rocky climb. Once we reached the pass we could enjoy a long downhill to Uterga and Muruzábal before we had to climb up to Óbanos. At Puente la Reina we tried to find something real to eat but there was no big choice either. We just had some things from a bakery and when we left we ran into Lisa and Flori, with whom we had a drink last night in Pamplona.
The whole day stayed cloudy, but there was no more rain making it down to the ground which was urgently needed. We saw grapes with fruits being small like pinheads. No way to press any wine out of these. To catch up time we decided to take the national road to advance towards Logroño.
We finally arrived by eight o’clock in Logroño and didn’t get the door code sent by e-mail as promised with the booking. There was no one at the place anymore and Robert had to call the owner to get the code. We could park our bikes in a huge courtyard and were heading into town to find something to eat. It was a Japanese Ramen place where we finally found some vegetable soup after all the meat we had lately. On our way back we were enjoying the live flamenco music played by Ayvan Romero in the road at the Catedral of Logroño. The feeling like being in the heart of Spain couldn’t get any more real and it was touching to realize that we had biked ourselves all the way there.
