Keeping going

Day 7 and stage 7 of the Camino, one of the longest stretches from Loc Arcos to Logroño. The earlier start was delayed by breakfast chatter encouraged by the very jolly manager who couldn’t do enough for us. I left at 7.30 prepared for a challenging day ahead. 
By coffee time at Sansol the temperature was already climbing. A conversation in french about Catalonia Independence with a charming chap who thought I was from Corsica was a good distraction. 
The route was quiet except in the very shady parts and out of nowhere a large group of school children appeared, 76 in all, and two very patient backmarkers, one of whom ended up retracing the the last few miles to look for a student’s phone. It was safe with a pilgrim.
The blip is my lunch stop under a large olive tree, water, 2 boiled eggs, a sweet pastry from breakfast and a Morrisons mint, the second last one. I was confident that at 9 miles it was over the halfway mark.
It wasn’t and the long descent into Viana and the even longer straightforward trek onto Logroño pushed us all. Sensibly most people had opted to break this section in half. I relished every underpass where the temperature dropped a couple of degrees.
My hostel just off the cathedral square, and feet away from the Camino is wonderful, I even have a bath, and in theory air conditioning only it’s so weak as to not really make a difference. It’s on the third floor of a nondescript building that I walked past at least three times.
Logroño is a lovely city in La Rioja, no longer Basque Country/Navarre. It’s Gothic cathedral, whose chimes I can hear, is impressive, the extra.
Another long distance tomorrow, as of now I’m switching to kilometres, the numbers go faster. And thinking about numbers I have realised that I have now done one fifth of the total distance, just another 643 km to go.