Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Life on the road

It is kind of a surreal experience trying to keep this blog up since I never have time to go back and see what I´ve already written about. Instead I have to try to remember what I have and have not ever gotten around to mentioning, which is usually less than ideal.

Anyway, Kate and I were discussing earlier, as we do almost every day, how weird it is to be here but in a completely normal way. Considered objectively, what we are doing is in most ways absurd. We rise before dawn to walk an obscene distance with our homes on our backs, spend every evening in a new, unknown place which may or may not involve food (and which we refer to as ¨home¨ even though it changes every night), depending on our luck, have incredibly close friends for only having known them for a week or two, and are put to bed promptly at 10 p.m. every night, sometimes by nuns. Most things about this are exactly opposite from the ¨real world¨. At home I would ideally be sleeping until noon, staying up way past midnight, and watching an obscene amount of Law and Order (most likely).

And yet, since we spend all of our time with people who have also decided to devote a substantial period of time to the Camino, and since we travel with them, sleep with them, and eat with them, it all seems perfectly reasonable. Of course I now wake up every morning at 6 a.m. from a bed that just may be infected with bedbugs. Of course.

That said, we´re still having a great time. We´re in a tiny town tonight and should be in Leon by the day after tomorrow, I think. The weather has been weird - it was horrible and cold and rainy last week and has never really heated up again - which is good for walking, but also bad when you expected 100 degree temperatures and packed accordingly. Tonight our new German friend Jean is cooking us dinner, a nice addition to our usual rotation.

One more thing before I go for today. One of my new Camino friends is keeping a blog as well. He has a phone that allows him to post pictures from the road, which is pretty cool but unfortunately beyond my capabilities. Most of the pictures are of him (since it is his blog after all), but I´m pretty sure I appear in some of them (most likely, since we spend almost all of our free time together) and, even if not, they will give some idea of what the camino is like. Anyway, if anyone is interested, the blog is at mo.bigbig.com

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Looked at the pictures; he has some good ones in there, but you're right; they're mostly of him. Looks like some beautiful country, but much flatter than I imagined. Need to look at a topographical map, I guess.