Najera to Granon

We started our beautiful day with brekkie at the local cafe along the river with our friend Guido.  We had a delicious coffee and tortilla espanola.   The coffee i ordered had sweetened condensed milk in it.  It was like candy!!!!

We walked through amazing land today.   A lot of it was in the country.  Many varieties of wheat, poppies, mountains, sweet peas and a grapevines make an delicious looking quilt of agriculture.  

We saw lots of amigos today.  We found Allie and Ryan, Jessica and Nick and met new friends Greg and Liz.

While we were walking today, we decided that Spain is a very smart country.  Starting from the clay tile roofs to the fresh squeezed orange juice that you can buy almost everywhere!   We have also loved looking at the architecture.  The very old vs. new is overly obvious.  I love seeing 1600 or 1800 on some peoples houses.  Incredible to believe buildings can be hundreds of years old.

We pitstopped in Santo Domingo with several other Camino friends for a snack of new tapas.  It was a nice way to tide over the afternoon.

We stayed at the albergue attached to the town church.  When we arrived we went inside and felt like we were walking up dark mysterious cement stairs to a castle.  We had to remove our hiking boots and leave our sticks outside.  We were some of the first walkers to arrive for the day and got a nice bit of Information from the hospitalera.  There will be cooking and a communal dinner then meditation at 9:30.

We did our normal shower up, laundry, foot massage, power nap routine and then got up to see the pueblo.  While napping we heard guinea pig or rat noises but we found out that they were swallows loving the steeple of the church. There were only about 2 blocks of town , which included a small store and a bar.  We are enjoying the generosity of the Spanairds. Carson and i shared a package of cookies and a bocadillo de jamon queso y tomates.  We went on to enjoy a few glasses of rioja region wine and then went back to the albergue to help prepare dinner.  We had a delicious salad to start with aceitunas verdes and corn.  The main meal was potato and chorizo sopa, followed by good old fruit cocktail.

We cleaned up dinner and went to a secret door in the albergue which led to the upstairs room of the church.  We did a pilgrim meditation and prayer with the 2 hospitaleras.  I really enjoyed the piece where we each took a turn holding tht pilgrim candle and said a few words or gave a few moments of silence.  The neat part for me was hearing why or what pilgrims appreciate about the camino in the many native languages people speak.  I was proud of Carson and his kind words.  He always knows the perfect thing to say. I let everybody know I was thankful for my Camino family.  We feel like we are really getting to know a lot of the people we leapfrog with every day.