Walking and Thinking (part two)

Pre-script: I totally ment to post this, like last week.  But due to a lack of internet, and clicking the wrong button, here it is now.  While today is actually day 26, with only 65 km left, most of this still holds true.  Look for more in a few days when we wrap this puppy up. 

So, today marks day fifteen of the Epic of the Camino, which is just about the half-way mark (or at least that's what I am telling myself to feel better).  By now, we've sent a second load of gear to be picked up at the end of the road, which has made our packs a feathery eight or ten kilos.  Our legs are longer screaming at us, and our feet have blistered, healed, and calloused.  We are officially pilgrims.

And so, as a pilgrim, I find myself pondering the Camino in various ways.

1) Mathematical - Today, on a stretch of paved road with signs marking the distances, I counted the number of steps I take in a kilometer: 1200.  A quick bit of mental math shows that this means each day (about 30 km) yeild 36000 steps.  Stretch that out to the full 30 days, and you have 1.08 million steps.  Now, flat paved road steps are the longest of all steps, so in theory, there are many more.  I think that by the time we finished, my feet will have hit the ground over 1.1 million times.  Which brings us to...

2) Physical - What is this trek doing to my poor body.  Well, besides the feet, there is the legs, knees, back and shoulders to worry about.  Most are good.  I forbid myself to complain about the physical (except to K, who has a fantastic knack for releiving pains) because of the number of old people walking the same distance.  I met a seventy-year-old who's been walking since somewhere in France, over 1200 km already.  But, once you get used to waking up at six a.m. every morning, and walking until about one p.m., you start to feel really good.  And not only physically good, but also...

3) Karmic - So far, I've returned two cell-phones to pilgrims who lost them along the way (what kind of pilgrim has a cell-phone, anyway).  I picked up a pair of lost walking sticks that K has been using in the hope of finding their original owner (two days later, and no takers...) and we've been walking with an Italian preist for about a week.  I like to believe that a direct result of these things is that we have not yet been without a bed along the Camino, a misfortune that many have faced with the innondation of Germans on the trail this year (due to some German commedian writing a book about it, from what we understand).  But our patience for ze germans is wearing thin, and I fear some karmic fallout will ensue.  Until then, we try to play nice, and we try to keep our heads together for...

4) Self exploration - Oh, I've done a lot of thinking on these first fifteen days, about the future mostly, but also about the opportunity we've had to travel the world, the things we've seen, and how I will approach the next legs of the trip.  I think there's a whole different post coming at the end of the Camino on this subject, so I'll just leave it at that.  Because we are, after all, only half-way done.

D.