Day 11 - From Pamplona to Puente la Reina, with unexpected encounters.

14 June

Day notes

Title

From Pamplona to Puente la Reina, with unexpected encounters.

Where I was / stage

June 14, start at 8:00 from Pamplona with a destination in mind: the Puente la Reina area, deciding step by step, village by village.

Key scene

The idea was simple: start walking and see where to stop, knowing I might meet Catherine and the others along the way. Shortly after starting, while I was still leaving the city, I met a woman who looked disoriented on the route. Her name is Ginger, American, from St. Antonio in Texas. I redirected her onto the Camino and she, very grateful, asked me to continue together.

Sensory detail

While walking she told me she had just started her Camino: she had been in Barcelona, then arrived in Pamplona to walk the section to Logroño, before returning to Texas. Arriving in Puente la Reina, I stopped for lunch: very good beans.

I liked Puente la Reina right away: my dormitory was right at the beginning of the long Calle Mayor, which crosses the whole town and leads to the river, where there is also the bridge. In the late afternoon/evening, to relax, I went there, sat on the grass near the water, and started carving my stick, removing the bark and leaving only the handle. I had already understood that this stick would become my travel companion until the end, so on the handle I had also started marking time: every morning, as soon as I woke up, I carved an “I” to mark a new day. A bit like prisoners do to count the days left until release, but for me it was the opposite: I was counting my Camino days, and I would keep doing it until the end.

There I chatted with an Italian guy and an Italian girl: they told me they had been traveling for years and that at that moment they were doing the Camino in reverse. At the time I did not pay attention to it. In the following days, though, there was a theft in a dormitory in another albergue, and the hospitalero let slip that these thefts are often committed by people walking the Camino in reverse, so they do not risk meeting the same pilgrims again in the following days. I know nothing about those two, but looking back they did not seem like “classic” pilgrims to me.

What I understood

Around 10:00/11:00 we also met Catherine. At that point we decided to continue all three together until the day's destination. In the evening Thomas wrote to me on WhatsApp: he had just arrived in Los Arcos (where I would arrive only on the afternoon of the 16th), while I had just arrived in Puente la Reina. It is one of those moments when you understand how the Camino has completely different rhythms for each person.