Neither rain, nor sleet, nor dread of night

From lovely Sarria, hello
We continue, paso por paso, step by step, and they keep adding up. We´ve passed the 400 mile mark, and have 72 to go and five days left to do them. We´ve slowed our pace to get to towns that have internet connections, I´m such a junky, but the pressure is off in terms of making miles for fear of not making it to Santiago on Monday. Today was a short 12 mile jaunt, and more about that in a minute, but
There is such a familiarity to each of our days. We get up around 5 out the door between 5:30 and 6 and walk usually for about 6-8 hours. Upon getting to the refugio it´s a shower, wash clothes, grab lunch, Carol hits her journal, Jim, the junkie, looks for a cyber cafe. A little time to talk with friends and a walk around town, dinner (always late in Spain) and to bed by nine. Then the next morning it´s the same routine again, and again, and again.
While that sounds rather boring each day, I suppose, there is actually tremendous variety to each day, and the last five have be emblematic of those differences.
On our Cruz de ferro day, we walked in total fog, cold total fog at that. We could see no more than 30-50 feet in front of us. We were told that there were incredible vistas to be seen, but you couldn’t prove it by us. The wind swirled around us, and always seemed to be coming directly at us. We really plodded that day. On the meseta, we started shedding clothing by 9 am, and by noon we were down to t-shirts, and short pants. But on the tough day to the cross of iron, we didn´t take our jackets off until after noon and never did shed the bottoms of our pants, Man it was cold. It was hard not to feel every step of the way and it was a long day from that aspect. But the weather finally did clear, and there were the vistas. Gorgeous, deep valleys, reminding us of our Inca trail trek in Peru and the Uribamba valley.
The next day was just glorious, Beautiful cloud formations moved their shadows across the landscape and created an ever-changing pattern of light and dark that kept drawing our attention away from our walking and we were at our immediate destinations much faster than we thought, so the day was just the opposite of the long drudge It was very short.
Then came O Cebreiro day, that day we both dreaded and to which we looked forward. That climb at the end of the 20 mile trek both fascinated us as to how we´d do, and, at the same time, we felt intimidated by it, because of the grueling aspect of the entire climb. Well, add a driving rainstorm into the mix, and we had ourselves a day. It started drizzling even before we left the refugio, Carol put on her poncho, but ever optimistic Jim, said: "It won´t last." It didn´t, the drizzle stopped and the rain started. See, I was right;-) By that time, I was drizzly wet and just stayed that way. The wetness combined with the sweat of the climb meant that I was a real mess by the time we got to the top. Carol too was wet, with the exception that her body from the waist to the neck was dry, but her shoes, pant legs (hey the water´s got to go somewhere off the poncho) were soaked and it was a long, hard day. I wanted to film the vistas, but it was just too wet, and I had nowhere to put the camera and not get it wet as well, not a good idea. So on we pushed. We had done an extra hour and a half the day before to cut down on the 10-11 hours the book says is needed to do the day. We left at 5 a.m. in the dark and arrived at the top at 1230, so we actually did it faster than the book says is necessary. Well, that´s not because we´re good, but because when you´re that miserable, unnecessary stops are really just adding to the misery, cause you´ve got to get going again, and that´s really hard. Plus, there was really nowhere to stop and stay dry anyway .So we just toughed it out. Thank god, I´ve got a wife who´s a tough lady and doesn´t cringe or whine when it gets really bad. Now if she only had a husband who did the same:-) We got the top and as we came over the crest what were we greeted by nothing but.........tour buses. It´s quite the little tourist spot. Japanese tour groups, school kids. The one that really got to me was the group of tourists all with the Camino scallop shell emblem around their neck, acting like they were pilgrims. Now, I´m usually not one to complain about how other people do their trips, but when I was that miserable and tired, it was a little frustrating to see these people frolicking with their umbrellas and then getting back on their bus, saying: "Buen Camino," to each other. Hey, that´s our saying, and you can´t have it:-) But it´s really a charming village and we enjoyed our 8 hours there. We posed for the webcam, talked to Ang who sent us screen shots to prove that we could be seen, and just felt a mixture of utter exhaustion and exhilaration. But after a hot shower and dry clothes, the weather cleared and it was just lovely - dry and warm. We decided that since it was our only day of rain, (and the fact that it was over and done with) it really added to our urban legend, "yeah, we did O Cebreiro, but we did it in a driving rain." Sort of the old: "when I was a kid, I had to walk through snow to get to school..............."
The next day was windy, I mean really windy. A long, hard descent off the top of O Cebreiro with all the vistas we couldn´t film the day before, followed by another long, steep ascent, and then a steep 3000 foot descent in 7 miles. Tough day and my back suddenly decided to act up. Walk 200 yards, stop and rest, walk 200 yards, stop and rest............ Carol´s knee troubled her, but she took it slow and did fine.
Today was black and ominous, but it never did rain on us. We had a good day. My back was fine, Carol´s knee didn´t act up and we breezed in after a 5 hour walk, and had to wait for the refugio to open.
So each day is so different. We never know what to expect and ´we´ve found that the only approach that works is to let it happen and deal with it. We can´t change it, we´ve got to get to the next spot and that´s all there is to it. Certainly takes the boredom out of the routine:-)
In my lost letter, I talked about our "Camino group" the people who all started out in Roncesvalles on the same day, and all the support that we got from each other. The night before I wrote that lost epistle from Burgos was a wonderful night. We were in this little village San Juan de la Ortega. We all went to mass, and they served Garlic soup to all the pilgrims in the monetary afterwards. There was only one bar (cafe) in the village and so everybody just hung out together cause there were only 12 houses in the whole place, and nothing else to do except sleep. Well, that all changed in Burgos. Lots of folks took an extra day to see the city; some used it as a rest day because we were all getting run down. And at the next stop we noticed that our little group of about 50-60 people had diminished considerably. That has continued to drop and today we lost the last of them. Lollie and Inma went further, as did Jose Andres, Meite and her brother Tony stopped short, and we´ve lost contact with Carla again. The last sighting of her was in O Cebreiro where she and Patrice got a room because the refugio was full, and at 11 the next morning, as we heard, they were still making goo-goo eyes at each other and hadn´t left the top of the mountain, either literally or figuratively:-)
So Carol, said: "Okay, it´s just us now. We´ve done that before, and we´ll do that again, so we´re fine." And it is. Five days left now. We´re gonna make it on time barring some spiritual or physical catastrophe. We see so many new faces. You can get your compestela, a certificate of completion for the Camino, just by doing the final 62 miles, and they´ve come out of the walls. A family of four, 12 and 7 year old boys, 4 school girls with an overly ambitious idea of their own invincibility (not to mention a lack of knowledge of the harshness of the Camino) last seen nursing blisters and bad knees. The refugios are overly packed, We hoteled it last night, just because we didn´t want to be part of the whole zoo scene. It was okay when we were with our friends, but just too much with 100 people new to the Camino and not having developed the cooperative spirit we have come to love and expect day in and day out.
It can´t take away from our wonderful camaraderie with people so special they just reach out and touch your hearts and spirits, but now, and we think it´s supposed to be this way, It´s our Camino, just Carol´s and mine. That seems the natural course. About a week or so ago, I telephoned home and was whining to our son about my aches and pains, doubting my abilities about completing the trek, and he just kind of stopped me short. "Ah, dad," he said, "you’ll make it!" I can´t tell you how much that meant to me. From so far away, a voice who knew me so well and had confidence in either my abilities or my stubbornness to know that I could and would do it. I left the telephone so charged with confidence. Then too, Ang, our daughter, sends us pictures of herself, Max, and Rich to help us keep in touch with what´s really important in the overall scheme of things to help is focus on the fact that we´re really not alone in this. Family is everything, whether it´s blood or developed on the Camino.
So we´ll do the last 72 miles together, paso por paso, enjoying each other´s company and support. We say at the end of each day, only 7,6,5 days left, and can´t believe that we´re so close. Of course, when you´re dodging rain clouds it´s hard to think of the ending. That´s part of it, I think, enjoy the process and not focus on the end.
I had to go back and re read my max rock letter. I wrote it in a bar with a television blaring a European soccer game about 5 feet from my head, surrounded by a crowd of rowdy and drunken fans. Ordinarily, just my kind of people and setting, but a little difficult when trying to concentrate on matters of personal and internal feelings. It didn´t totally capture my thoughts, but it´ll have to do.
I´ve got all these notes about which I want to write, but I get started on one thread and it seems to get to the point where: "it´s supposed to be a letter, Jim, not a dissertation." So things are still in there. Tomorrow, another cyber stop, supposedly, and maybe now that I´m pretty caught up, I can get to talking about some of the things to which I haven´t been able to get to. But then again, who knows what tomorrow holds. That´s both the wonder and mystery of our lives at the moment.
So until then,
We´re still living large,
Jim and Carol
p.s. Oh, yeah. Tonight´s a fiesta night here in Sarria, the eve of St. James, I think. Sounds like a late, noisy, and utterly remarkable evening. Maybe there´s a story there................;-)