Day 10: Torrres del Rio to Logroño
It is hard to walk without expectations. I remember clearly my 2013 walk to Logroño: the good, bad, and the painful. Mostly painful. So I walked hoping to see things remembered. 
The path was frequently downhill or level. We walked through vineyards, vineyards, and more vineyards. Reminded me of home. 😀 As we approached Logroño, there were many abandoned vineyards, and we wondered if these were more examples of farmlands left by the children of farmers who were uninterested in vineyards or farming. 
In fact, we see mostly elderly farmers working the soil and baling the hay. Old men stop and wave as we pass them rota-tilling the dirt. Men drive the John Deere machinery, very often they are old men who wave and mouth “Buen Camino.” From the too-busy-to-look-up business types, we rarely get so much as ¡Hola! They seem bored by us. But the old ladies standing amongst the olive trees still ask us to hug the apostle in Santiago, or to pray for them.
We passed many pilgrim built rock cairns, often plastered with prayer cards or slips of paper in languages I can’t read, and even cigarette wrappers and boxes. I think people make resolutions, and leave a piece of themselves (boots, shoes) or a symbolic representation of the habit they wish to leave behind. Rebirth. (Jan, our Dutch friend, said you had to die on the Camino. There are paper evidences of symbolic deaths at every cairn we pass.)
We passed a stone igloo with a ratty looking sleeping bag inside. I didn’t go in. I feared what would try to get out as I crawled inside. We went inside a magnificent church in Viana, collected our sellos from the church, saw our friend from Montreal now walking on crutches, and rediscovered the Buen Camino blue shell graffiti that I’d like to have as a tattoo someday. 
But it was the smell of the evergreen forest we walked through that made magic. A mixture of pine, soil, and vegetation that reminded me of church kept me walking blissfully onwards towards Logroño. We passed a “hippie stand” I recalled buying a drink at on my last Camino. The heavy old lady and her heavy old dog were still there, trying to stay cool in the extreme heat, but another woman greeted us with cold drinks, religious items for sale, and shade trees under a park bench. We spoke in the usual mix of Spanish and English, and she rewarded our efforts with a gift of hand picked apricots from the tree we rested under.
In Logroño, I saw storks in chimney stacks again and in the church towers. I heard storks in the church towers. I had never before wondered at the sound a stork made, and there it was! If I had been listening to music on my iPhone, like my fellow pereginos, I would have missed that crazy stork sound, and other Camino music that makes the journey easier and hypnotic at times.
So I was pleased by the familiar and surprised by the new. But the familiar brought up memories of home, as I repacked the items I purchased at the hippie stand for my daughters. And, as if on cue, Zoë called me in a blue moment. She missed me, and hours before her call, I had photographed some dandelion fluff that reminded me of her tattoo. I missed her. Familiarity allows the heart to roam comfortably to other familiarities in otherwise strange lands. And that is a good thing. We are not on vacation or running away. We are on pilgrimage, thinking and praying for our loved ones and ourselves, grateful for the privilege, and always connected to what matters most in our lives.

Ultreia!
~Penny