What day is it?

Time has ceased to matter.  The days blend together and I don't remember what happened on which day.  There was one day that we walked through a field of grasshoppers and I was sure they were going to leave welts on my legs there were so many of them bouncing around.  Did you know they're cannibals?  Many of them had been squished by cars or pilgrims, and... well, you get it.  Once we were stopped by a group of mountain bikers who asked us to take their photo by a waterfall, so we had them take one of us, too.  I tripped and had to put my foot in the river while walking out to the waterfall,  but it actually felt pretty good in the heat.  While we posed for the photo, we realized that they could steal our stuff and run away if they had wanted to.  Oops.  There was the time that we arrived at our destination at 12h45 and at 13h the town's yearly week-long festival began with fireworks and the church bells right above our heads clanging incessantly for a good five minutes.  A group of little boys ran up to the fountain we were sitting by, put a firework in it, and sprinted away just as water exploded out of the fountain.  The entire town was dressed in white with red accents in celebration.  

A typical day on the Camino goes something like this:

Someone's alarm clock goes off around 6am and you can hear the collective groaning of the fifty or so people in the room.  I push my earplugs in tighter and roll over, the bed creaking incessantly as I do so.  I wonder if the person in the bunk below me has gotten any sleep with my tossing and turning.  Someone turns the lights on at 6:30 (or 6:25 if they're being impatient) and I wake up again.  At this point I lay in my bed and watch the commotion of people trying to repack their bags, bandage up their feet, and get everything sorted for the day.  I love people-watching and hate waking up, so this just seems like the natural thing to do.  I lounge in my bed until 6:40 or so, stretching and making funny faces at Emily, before I finally get out of my sleeping bag.  Usually I plop down on the floor and pretend to sort things (even though they were never unsorted, because everything I have with me is in a bag of some kind inside my pack) while really just leaning against the bedpost and trying to wake up.

Once our bags are packed and we're ready to go, we sit down for a small breakfast.  Today, for example, it consisted of one hard boiled egg and an apple.  This leaves me very cranky, because I now refuse to drink vending machine coffee after a few bad experiences but need the caffeine, and one egg and an apple is not enough of a breakfast for me.  We leave the albergue around 7:30 or so, depending on how much we dawdle, and this typically puts us in the last third of the pack.  After a kilometer or so, we're warmed up and have a pretty decent pace.  We might chat with others, we might walk alone.  Within the first two hours, we usually find a restaurant with a good espresso machine and plop down for what I consider a real breakfast: coffee.  Today I had cafe con leche (espresso with milk), a yogurt, and a croissant.  Oh, and I also bought some plums and a banana.  I am now a very happy, well-fed pilgrim with a few extra snacks to eat along the way.

We resume walking, my socks getting progressively filthier because I am wearing sandals with them.  (Remember, all dignity has already been lost.)  We stop every once in awhile, but it's less frequent now than it was a week ago.  We've gotten pretty good at getting to the essentials without stopping, and my bladder seems to have expanded a bit.  We might stop to have a picnic of baguette, chorizo or canned tuna, and cheese, or we might keep walking until we get to the town for the day and have lunch then.  We usually arrive anywhere from 1:30 to 3:30, at which point we proudly hand over our pilgrim passports to have them stamped, pay the six euros for a bed, and start unwinding for the afternoon.  What happens after that varies day to day, but typically includes a shower, washing our clothes by hand, and reading or journaling for a bit.  Today we sat under a tree and shared a bottle of wine with these two Canadian gals who have been friends for the same number of years that Emily and I have, but who are more than twice our age. 

Of course, strange things always happen along the way, and if something can go wrong, it will inevitably go wrong for me.  Today, for example, I went to pick a few wild blackberries and ended up with tiny thorns in my legs.  Blisters, a sore Achille's, bruises, scrapes, allergies... apparently I'm a recipe for disaster.  But so many amazing, random things have happened as well.  During the festival that we found ourselves at a few days ago, I got pulled into the middle of the drunken dancing circle to help the guy with the microphone demonstrate this goofy dance the whole town was doing and ended up dancing in a circle with my finger in his belly button.  Good thing I speak Spanish, or who knows where I could have put my hand... Today we happened upon a guy with a donkey who didn't want to walk anymore, so I sang to him and told him what a handsome donkey he was in Spanish (he was a Spanish donkey with a Hungarian owner, so perhaps he was just feeling homesick) and he seemed to like that a bit.  Every time something random like this happens, I have to pinch myself to remember that this is real.  I keep saying that I'm avoiding "real life" by traveling, but perhaps this IS my real life.

I really hope it is.

K

Viana, Spain