Day 12 (10/4) - Puenta la Reina to Estella (23.8km)

Breakfast in hotel and hit trail around 8am. It is interesting to be walking the same path as last year (finally) and see what we recognize. Now that we are on the heavily travelled Camino Frances we will have more frequent villages and they will more often have bars or cafes. We passed through villages every 4 or 5 kilometers, stopping for ice cream in mid-morning and then lunch in Lorca at the same albergue where we spent the night last year. Along with the large number of pilgrims which was interesting, we were annoyed by the number of mountain bikes. They never use bells so it is worrisome to be walking along in a meditative state and suddenly have a biker zip by and sometimes this is on a fairly narrow trail. Cindy developed blisters on her heels today -- why after 150 miles of rougher trails and no problems? Ah well, that's the nature of things. We passed through Estella last year mid-day and thought it was an interesting place so now are spending Saturday night here. The first albergue we checked out (ANFAS) was closed so we stayed in a parish albergue (donativo). We headed off to scout dinner places around 6:30pm and the city squares were fairly busy and had a wine at a bar and worked on our journals. Around 7pm it was like a switch was thrown and LOTS of people were out and about. Really interesting how Spaniards are walking around in the evenings - families, etc. and children playing. Ran into a couple from Poulsbo who we saw earlier (Bill and Cindy Abby) who are biking the Camino and had tapas and drinks with them.






Ancient bridge at Puenta la Reina (name of city means Queen's Bridge).





Typical paths for the day (above and below)





Village along the route.











Today we walked along portions of ~2000 year old Roman road. Pretty cool!

Location:Estella, Spain