Walking, 18500 steps, wineries and a pinchos party to farewell Logrono

Wednesday 18 September
Some observations so far. The bread and fruit in France was to die for. Also imagine strawberries that looked and tasted like they did when you were a kid. Not the tasteless, half ripe nonsense you get in Coles and the stone fruit was as if you had just picked it from the tree at six o'clock on a foggy spring morning in the orchard. The Bergerac and Bordeaux wines were all excellent and the cities and towns from Paris to Auriac were clean and friendly. Paris and France should be proud of their response to the influx of foreign tourists. Spain so far has been exciting, with the same clean towns, pride in their heritage and despite our very limited Spanish, they have been helpful and friendly. Some, even a little bit cheeky. But, the bread is awful. Worse than the Coles crap we have to put up with. How can this be? The fruit is likewise not up to the French standard. However, we  have not had a bad wine. In fact, the Rioja wines have been excellent. Logrono is a lovely city, about the size of Cairns, with some stunning architecture and clean wide tree lined streets, hundreds of bars and cafes. All of the shops and cafes play music, both in France and Spain and the interesting thing is most are playing  English songs. Usually recent pop like Ed Sheeran, Adele or even Elton and a smattering of crap 80’s do da  da, but it's all in English. Flashy was even groovin' along to The Mixtures and  Mungo Jerry’s 1970 bubblegum pop The Pushbike song. After a walk into town to see some different areas and look at buying some Spanish shoes, which we didn't in the end, we headed off in the car to look at three spectacular wineries. It's interesting hearing a winemaker in Bordeaux say “I make wine not do tastings.” There are magnificent wineries in very old Chateaux but nothing special in the new ones. Likewise, on the whole here in Rioja. However, we visited two of a handful of newly constructed, multi million euro , stunningly designed architectural buildings, for hmmmm not really sure other than to house the admin, shop and tasting and  their restaurant of course, but what an investment in public art from the private sector. D ‘Arenburg's Cube, I guess, is similar.

Then to top off a cultural rather than gastro tour, We head for LaGuardia to look at a Frank Gehry designed boutique hotel, with it's roof resembling scrunched tissue paper – you will have gathered by now after my Guggenheim visit I am  a Frank Gehry groupie. All this was achieved without map or compass nor reference to Amilee.

Well done Lady P. As a reward, she can drive to Madrid in the morning. Flashy is preparing for the assault on the pinchos bars tonight. Lady P is keen to try 9 of them. He is snoozing. Power naps, he calls them. The pinchos bars can be quite blokey, with more men than women, so you need to treat them as a public bar in Brunswick – elbows out, bit of a swagger, eye contact with the barman or chick and a loud voice. All fine in English in Brunswick, but gets a tad stressful in Logrono with very limited Spanish and I mean very limited! We shall see. It gets easier after the fourth vino tinto, though. It was a different crowd tonight, compared with the boisterous locals on Saturday. Mostly tourists tonight with lots of Americans about. The bar staff seemed less stressed and as usual, most spoke quite good English.

We made it to six bars with most of the favourite, pre-researched pinchos ticked off the list. Although, at one bar we ordered one lamb and one calamari dish but were convinced by the young hipster waiters, that they were large serves. True to form, the BBQ'd lamb over vine branch coals, with peppers and potatoes cooked in the dripping lamb fat, were pretty good. Probably equivalent to four serves, so that made our quota! The wine serves were small, so Flashy was looking for a nightcap on our return to the apartment. A couple of Grand Marniner nips did the trick.