Day 5–Villamayor de Monjardin—An Uphill Climb—4/26/2024

Before leaving Maneru, I stopped at a nearby café for an egg sandwich, OJ and coffee con leche. It was then onto smaller villages like Cirauqui, Lorca and Villatuerta which seemed pretty empty with just one lunch spot in Lorca.

I stopped for a lunch of bean soup while in Estella. Siggy from Austria had a hamburger, and Taru from Japan had octopus. It seems like you can get some really interesting food here in Spain.    

Shortly after leaving the town of Estella, we came to a monastery in Irache that had wine flowing from one of the spigots outside the church along with another spigot of water. Pilgrims were invited to take a sip and not a whole bottle, like some did. It was adjacent to the Bodega Irache winery that supplied 100 L of wine per day for this amazing offering.  People on the social Camino websites were heavily criticized for taking more than a sip.

From here, it was an uphill journey through many mustard fields and wheat fields until I came to the Villamayor de Monjardín where I selected the Albergue Oasis Trails to stay the night.

It then began to intermittently rain while I tried to dry out my clean clothes, socks, and shirt and towel.

This was the first Albergue that I experienced the host offering a prayer before the pilgrim dinner and the dinner was kind of a gloppy one pot Thai curry peanut meal and not like the amazing three course pilgrim meals I had had at other places.  I hope this is not a trend.

Afterward, they invited the pilgrims to attend a prayer session in the meditation room. It turns out that this group is an ecumenical  Christian group with roots out of the Netherlands.

There were two hosts: David from the Netherlands and Sara from Virginia. 

During dinner, I sat by David and he told me how this place had changed his life from one of depression and decadence to one of happiness once he found this holy place for him. he described how he started his hiked on the Camino just because he couldn’t think of anything else to do. He spent the night at this Albergue.  The following day he left, but was driven to return due to an overwhelming compulsion and inspiration that changed his life. he has been volunteering here ever since that first hike on the Camino over three years ago.

The showers were hot, but the night was cold in the rooms and I was so glad they had blankets here. My luck is holding out with that situation.

They had offered bag breakfast, but I chose to hike on to the next village for a hot breakfast.