The Home Stretch

Can you believe I've been gone almost a month already?

If all goes as I hope it will (knocking furiously on wood), I will be in Santiago de Compostela this time next week. My first 3 days of Warp Speed to Santiago have gone reasonably well. They're not easy days and I've slept like a dead person every night, but I haven't cut my feet off or cried yet. The nights are as fun as the days are difficult, so that makes a lot of it worthwhile. Last night we sat around a picnic table telling jokes in 4 different languages, with different people translating so everyone could understand. Most jokes invoked the topic of the Last Supper, and I had to leave the table a couple of times because I almost wet my pants from laughing so hard.

I have an inexplicable mental block against walking after 3pm. I don't know what it is, and I totally can't help it. At about 2:55, I start unintentionally dragging ass and can't really get back into the game, regardless of how many café con leches I down. Since I'm walking for about 12 hours each day now, I have to compensate appropriately. This has involved waking up between 4:30 and 5:30am. Not that big of a deal for me, especially since I'm sort of a random sleeper to begin with. The problem lies in then trying to get myself (and my ridiculously large backpack) out of a room filled with no less than 30 other sleeping people. I've refined my technique, but not before a few moments of trial and error. The first morning, my mom called at 6:00am to say hi. Great. Normally an excellent time to take advantage of the 7 hour time difference between Spain and Texas. Except I was trying to move my things out of the maze of a room I was staying in, and in the process left my cell phone sitting on my bottom bunk. With the ringer was turned ALL the way up. And I was all the way out of the door before I heard it. I'm not sure how more people didn't wake up, but I grabbed the phone, my sunglasses, my guidebook and hightailed it out of the albergue before anyone could figure out that I was the one responsible for disturbing their sleep at that ungodly hour of the morning. Fortunately, I've gotten smart. I have started leaving my strategically packed bag in the hallway at night so I can pop my sleeping bag in the next morning and leave without dropping my metal Sigg bottle or smashing into someone's bed in the dark.

Fortunately, I have a room all to myself tonight. Today was a 38km hike that started at 5am. 32km involved varying levels of really cold rain. If anyone saw me at the Radiohead concert in May, I sort of looked like that again by the time I got to the albergue. I was that happy, too. I was dying for a shower, my warm clothes, and my sleeping bag, but before I could even make it back to the bunk beds, I was greeted by a swarm of flies. They were everywhere. I couldn't count them all, and I couldn't keep them off of me. I can handle a lot of things - cold showers, snoring, wearing not clean socks because I had no means by which to wash and dry clothing the night before... but I cannot handle flies. They freak me out. So I walked 2km to the next town and happily forked over 15€ to spend the night in a pensión housed in a gorgeous old mansion. I have two beds to choose from in a room with no men emitting various disturbing noises throughout the night, and I can turn the lights on while I'm packing to leave at 4:30 tomorrow morning.

I know this all sounds incredibly appealing - soaking wet uphill hikes in cold rain, vermin, blisters... but believe it or not, I'm still having an amazing time. Two days ago I had a really rough hike up a 400m high mountain. It was a steep slope that went almost straight up, and I though I might actually fall over dead halfway up the hill. But I didn't die. I made it all the way up to the top of the uphill climb that just wouldn't quit. When I turned around to see where I had come from, I got the most euphoric rush I've had in years. Not only was the view incredible, but I'd gotten up there all by myself, even though I wasn't sure I could do it. Even after the hardest day, as cranky and tired as I might be when I first set my pack down at an albergue, I still feel happy about what I've done. It's like I've conquered something by not giving in and taking a bus when I'm so tired of walking that I want to throw something at someone.