Distance traveled: 19.9 km 

Today we crossed into La Rioja… the region that produces the eponymous wine! I have been a Rioja fan for a long time, and while the wine we’d had every night thus far hadn’t been bad, I was excited for the inevitable upgrade we’d have while in wine country.

I sent my backpack ahead again, and we set off earlier than usual given the high temperatures forecast for the day. What a visual treat we got as the sun came up!

Later in the morning, we passed through the town of Viana, which was of interest to me as a big fan of the Showtime series “The Borgias”. If you’ve seen that or are otherwise familiar with the endlessly fascinating Borgia family (Pope Alexander VI and his supposed illegitimate children), Viana is the town were Cesare Borgia finally met his end and was buried. Here is the stone marking that event outside the main church:

An hour or two after leaving Viana, we finally crossed into La Rioja. (Up until this point, we’d been walking in the province of Navarra.)

We arrived in Logroño, which is a proper city, just in time for the traditional Sunday mid-afternoon dinner that many families were enjoying in restaurants all around our albergue.

We all wandered around together after eating. We are now getting into a part of the country with some pretty stunning churches:

I really enjoyed both of the graphics on this banner outside the church, referencing Logroño’s importance from the perspective of both the Camino and wine:

We found a fountain that had been giving pilgrims water for centuries:

And we saw one of my favorite Camino-related murals of the entire journey:

There’s a play on words here. Without the crossed out E, what this says is “the Camino de Santiago is done in stages”; after you eliminate the E, the meaning changes to “the Camino de Santiago is done for the tapas”. If you’ve been to Spain, you know that many taps are served on toothpicks, which here is doubling as a pilgrim’s staff. I think the whole thing is very clever!

I stayed that night in a semi-private room with Chuck and Kim. (In any other circumstances, staying in a room with a married couple I had just met 24 hours before would have been awkward and strange, but on the Camino, these things seem perfectly normal!) Kim was also suffering from blisters, so I was in good company. I performed some real surgery on myself that evening, but this was the last bad day for me; I bought some Tevas the following morning and was able to give my toes the space they needed to heal. Kim was also kind enough to give me a silicone cap for the toe that had become one big blister, and that was a real game-changer. So, here’s what my right foot (the more injured one) looked like at this blister and tendinitis pinnacle:

Final words on blisters, since from this point they weren’t such a problem for me. Pilgrims on the Camino are almost guaranteed to get blisters, though I do know people who didn’t. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to them – in my opinion, it’s not a matter of which shoes or socks you wear, and you might get them after walking in the same shoes for days without problems. The best advice I can give is:

• Buy shoes that are a half or full size up from what you normally wear so that you’re giving your feet plenty of room to move and to swell (which they’ll do naturally over the course of the day).
• Make sure you’ve broken in whatever shoes you’re planning to wear, which means not just walking long distances in them but also doing sustained climbs and descents in them.
• Put anti-friction cream or something like Vaseline on your feet in the morning and reapply as necessary throughout the day. (Some people also swear by changing your socks every couple of hours.)

And finally, a note to anyone contemplating doing the Camino Francés in the future: consider taking a day off in Logroño. You’d be doing your body a favor after six hard days of walking, and since it’s the capital of the wine region, it’s a great place to spend time if you’re an oenophile like me. There are a lot of bodegas (wineries) you can visit. I was anxious to stick with my Camino family and wasn’t certain I could catch them up if they went on ahead, but if ever repeat this route, I’m probably going to take an extra day here