It’s the end of day 6, and we’ve taken the decision to have a half day.

As mentioned in We passed 100km!, we had planned on a long day today and a rest day tomorrow (every week, walk for 6 days and rest for 1).

However, we decided to walk for half a day on both days… so we get the same rest and travel the same distance, but get to look around two different places instead of one.

And thus today took us from Estella to Villamayor de Monjardin – a relatively short 9.07km trek along fairly easy terrain.

We started at a bakery – Ega Pan – just by our albergue for our usual petit déjeuner of a strong coffee and pastry, then off via a – sadly not-yet-filled – free wine fountain followed by a brief walk to Azqueta for a break. This entailed visiting a really cool cafe run by a Dutch guy, containing a jukebox and free to play Ms Pac-Man arcade machine!

After that we headed to our destination for a few cheeky beers, wines, and the local aniseed spirit, Patxaran (pronounced patch-a-ran).

Our albergue for the night, Oasis Trail, had a real community feel with its communal dining and welcoming hosts. We declined the invite to their post-meal prayer, meditation, and mint tea session… but thanked them profusely for the offer and the amazing moussaka meal.

Tomorrow brings another half day, more to report then!

The van in question (see the page title) was a bakery van belonging to the same bakery where we enjoyed our petit déjeuner. Apparently they drive around the local area blaring their horn to tempt the residents out to buy bread (pan in Spanish – similar to pain in French). Literally a pan van 😜.