

I walked into Santo Domingo shortly after noon, after leaving Najera a little before eight o’clock. I’d decided that (1) the best hour for walking the Camino is between eight and nine, when the sun is rising and the mist is burning away, and (2) I was going to die if I couldn’t manage to eat at least one sit-down meal a day. Since a sit-down meal at night is impossible – the Spanish subsist on an evening diet of wine, beer, and tapas – lunch seemed the available alternative.
I was also bent, although with less life-threatening priority, upon breaking out of the pilgrim ghetto of the “menu del dia,” offered wherever the Camino passes through a town or village. It devolves to an endless succession of ensalada mixta and lomo (roast meat, usually swine). So I walked around town and settled on a restaurant offering, among other Spanish specialties, “alubias y bacalao.” I knew I love baked beans, so I was willing to risk salted cod, which my short Spanish menu cribsheet defines as “salt cod, a Basque specialty, an acquired taste.” I was rewarded with not only a great meal (with a vast amount of rather good Rioja wine as part of the 10-euro set menu), but also a restaurant eventually filled with local people, or at least Spanish tourists, without a single foreigner, let alone a peregrino. From now on, I only walk early and try to eat outside the pilgrim menu-del-dia rut.