roadtrip!

its been a week since i last posted, which feels as unbelievable to me as the fact that i am leaving spain in only a little more than 24 hours. what? how did that happen? how has time gone by so fast that it is almost august? incredible.

on the 25th, abbey and willy arrived in santiago after driving all night. they were absolutley in the most ridiculous state of mind i have ever since either of them in, and their insanity was infectious. by the end of the day, anna and i were speaking in a strange half english half nonsense language that none of the four of us seem to be able to break ourselves out of. at least i don´t have to go back to school and try to sound smart in the fall. what a relief.

after taking them home so they could shower, we all went out for chinese food, which in spain tastes exactly like spanish chinese food. that is to say, its like chinese food in the states only without any flavor and crunchy where it shouldn´t be. we decided to walk around santiago a little bit, attempt to find somewhere to buy bread and cheese for dinner (even though it was a sunday and nothign is open on sundays), and see a tiny fraction of the city. instead we abandoned our plans to hunt for bread because we found a huge ferris wheel and a carnival to accompany it right in the middle of santiago. replete with small children holding balloons, cotton candy stands, strange games with huge stuffed animals as prizes, and definitely more than a few rides that are illegal in the states, this carnival was a serious find. who cares if steam was coming out of the electrical sockets on one of the rides or if the ferris wheel was making inauspiscious noises? we were having the time of our lives in the pouring rain!

we spent a few more days together in santiago before willy, abbey, and i hopped into pepe, our fantastic two door car, to begin our drive from santiago to valencia. little did we know that we were about to encounter more magic than i even knew existed. we took a highway that cut through portugal and got off for lunch just over the border, where we found a castle perched atop a beautiful little city with winding streets and colorful houses. we were utterly astounded by the beauty of portugal, and in the northern mountains found vista after vista that made us pull over and take a dozen pictures each. it felt like we must have done something right in our previous lives in order to be having this experience. picutres would only barely describe how amazingly beautiful it all was and words certainly can barely capture the moment.

it was not the last time we would be in the mountians before the day was out, but we left portugal in a daze of happiness inspired by nature only to find the best gas station of all time just across the border. hoping to beg some bread and cheese from the bar there, we instead found a fully equiped general store. for those of you who have been to dan and whit´s in norwich, vt, it was like that...only better. since we were in the middle of nowhere in spain of the side of a spanish highway. we bought snacks and cards and willy bought a new pair of sneakers. truth.

we drove up to the top of the mountians just outside of madrid around midnight, where we ate dinner, almost got run over by bulls, and saw madrid in all of its night time glory. seriously. magic was everywhere....especially considering that we almost ran out of gas, until we suddenly found a gas station just at the right moment with the nicest hotel for super cheap just across the street. we all feel asleep feeling absolutely marvelous and woke to a beautiful morning with clear skies and sunshine.

we drove the rest of the way to valencia, stopping for the night on abbey´s floor (although we weren´t supposed to be there...and if her madre came home, willy´s game plan was to either a) pretend we were cleaners or b) push her over and run out the door into the streets of valencia. in his boxers. so maybe game plan is not really what we should call it. i didn´t really have any kind of game plan. after getting a sunburn on the coast of the meditterean (spelling?), willy and i said goodbye to abbey (tear!) and got on a train coming north to barcelona. we were welcomed by anna´s family friends with a shower (which we needed. badly.) and a homecooked meal.

august 1st, we´ll be in paris!!!

the end of the world

well i have been to the end of the world and lived to tell the tale.

i arrived in cabo finisterre, which people used to think was the westernmost point in europe, last wednesday for a few days of r&r by the sea. as the result of my still quite swollen achilles and the significant pain they were causing me, i decided that the best option was for me to take a bus to finisterre, or more specifically to the town on the instead of its harbor, fisterra, and wait for anna who had elected to walk the remaining 90km. had we been able to go at a slower pace, i would have walked--i wished i´d been able to!--but in the end, my health mattered more to me than anything else and because the towns are spaced farther apart on that stretch of the camino, it would have been impossible for me to walk all the way.

fisterra is a fairly small town right on the coast--in fact it has coast on two sides. if you google map cabo finisterre (and you should, ´cause its sweet looking), you will see that it sticks out into the ocean like a finger pointing southwest into the atlantic ocean. fisterra sits right in the middle of that "finger" and so has coast on both sides. once anna arrived on saturday morning, we met up with a few other ex-caminoers our age (joe and brendan from limmerick and galway, laura from boston, and lisa from amsterdam) to swim in the bay on one side (one word: COLD) and then had a picnic dinner on the other side, watching the sun slide into the atlantic sometime just before 10pm.

after our picnic was over, the six of us headed down to the beach itself, where people were setting up a bonfire in the sand. it was an incredible experience to sit around the fire and talk about life and the world and this THING we did, which was now over. some people brought guitars out and started singing, others sat in silence, we sat drinking wine, and others burned their clothes that had survived the camino...if barely. anna discarded her stained t-shirt, others their jackets, pants, at ripped hat--all of them beloved but, well gone.

we are now in portugal, having really left the camino ourselves, having a few days of at home time (as it were) in the apartment of a family friend of anna´s mom in lisbon. so far, we have spent a night out on the town with dana (the family friend), a night in vegging, a day shopping, and a day doing errands and seeing the sights. lisbon is beautiful--coming from the end of the earth to the place where the age of discovery in europe began seems fitting--and its been amazing having a home to stay in!

tomorrow, back up to santiago de compostela to meet up with willy and abbey, and then the next phase of the great european adventure commences!

besos!

santiago de compostela

the road has to end somewhere.

objectively, this is a fact. no road goes on forever, eventually mountains and oceans and forests and national wildlife refuges get in the way. i´ve known all along that eventually we would get to santiago, and that although we would extend our camino to cabo finisterre on the coast of the atlantic (about 90km from here), that essentially i would eventually have to finish this road. the journey would, by its very definition, come to an end.

but i didn´t think it would happen so soon.

walking is such a different kind of travel--you suspend the moment of arrival in your final destination because each day has its own destination. sometimes all you are capable of is thinking to yourself (quite literally): one more step. one more step. one more step, but still there is always an immediate destination and now...we are here and the immediate destination is our final one. santiago is the end of the road, and for the first time in almost two weeks, we will sleep in the same place for more than three nights. how strange to think of actually seeing a city, rather than passing through it...and that we will come back again for three more nights is astounding. in total, we will spend about 6 days and nights here--and maybe more.

the camino has momentarily suspended time for me--i hardly know what time of day it is, let alone what day, and most importantly, i haven´t had time to be concerned about the future. all my worries about what to do with my life, how i will pay the bills and find dance classes and find dancers and become world famous (kidding!) have been erased by this constant need to live in the present. the camino prevents us from really being absorbed in anything other than the conversation we are having, the sensation of the road beneath our feet and our sound of our breath, and the beauty that surrounds us everyday which i have never had to find time to notice. its all of these things that have made this experience what it is, but the people and community here, the natural beauty, the coziness of these tiny towns we pass through in five minutes or less, the stillness of foggy mornings and the heat of the sun are sensations which have made every pain i´ve had, the swollen state of my achilles tendons, and my exhaustion each afternoon not only seem worth it, but seem blessed.

compostela means field of stars, and that is what i have been in, each day and each hour of this journey.

so little, so much

unbelievably, anna and i are only 50km from santiago. i am literally not sure how this happened. weren´t we being jostled awake on a french train at the spanish border just the other day? ridiculous.

the road is so much more crowded now that we are out of sarría, the last place to start and still receive a compostelum (certificate of completion), including so many more slackpackers and the like. despite that though, i have managed to walk most of the past few days walking alone, in part because i am so slow with all my injuries and blisters, and in part because i am simply enthralled by the scenery and the people. last night, anna and i split up for the night and i stayed in an albergue run by a christian organization that provides free housing and food to pilgrims. it was absolutely magnificent to be holding a conversation in german, spanish, english, swedish, and italian all at once around a table of homemade food, complete with jokes and laughter and this sense of community. there were a few familiar faces--some people who have caught back up with us or who we have now caught up with again--and everyone shares the same sense of excitement. we are all so close!

i´m still in a lot of pain from my achilles and have experienced quite a bit of numbness in my toes at the end of the day also. i wish i had trail shoes with me, rather than hiking shoes, and while my back has been great the whole time, you can bet that next time i will carry less weight...

anna and i will be in santiago by sunday for the pilgrims mass, but its unlikely i´ll be able to post before then. be well, be safe, and wherever you are in the world, i wish you a buen camino.

a view from the top

last night we spent at the top of the world.

at least, thats what it felt like. o cebreiro is a tiny little town--okay, its a village--but its literally on top of a mountain. on one side of town, you have views over the entire valley that lies in the provience of castilla y león, and a two minute walk through "town" and you find yourself looking out over the entire valley that lies in the provience of galacia. the fog was rolling in, the wind was wiping, and while the climb was certainly no everest, it was as filled with the same sensation of success.

we met up with our canadian moms, ana and eleanor for desert, braving the heavy rain and mist that rolled in the late afternoon, unfortunately obscuring the view. we were exhausted and cold from our climb, and my newly diagnosed "inflammed achilles tendon" (i actually went a doctor in villafranca--which was free! i love europe) gave me some trouble to be sure up the mountain. however, after a cold shower and a nap, the world seemed much brighter, and dinner with our favorite adoptive parents was icing on a very scenic cake. we spent the day walking down the mountain with them, and it was nice to return to our normal pace--22k today. we are now only 133k from santiago--which really is only a few more days. its amazing how fast the time is flying.

it feels so strange to think that in some other part of my life, people get up and do different things everyday but in the same place. here we go somewhere new literally everyday but we are doing the same thing everyday. its actually the most relaxing, if not the most physically healthy, vacation i have ever taken. we simply wake up and walk.

on another note however, we may have become infested with bed bugs. we need to see a doctor to be sure...but we are suspicious. and covered in welts.

alright, well its bed time for me. i would say sleep tight and don´t let the bed bugs bite, but well, it might be too late for that.

¡muchas besos a todos!

one week and counting

...well we´re still alive, so thats something.

its been officially one full week of walking for anna and i at this point, and to be honest, i am much worse for the wear than she is. anna looks tan, healthy, and has a stride to her step that i envy immensely (she just knocked on wood). i, on the other hand, am blistered, am finally feeling some pain in my broken foot area, had two days of unbelievable pàin in my hip rotators as we went over the highest point in the mountains, and now seem to have acquired a tightness in my achilles tendon that is as mentally distressing as it is physically painful. its also swollen. AWESOME. basically, to sum up, i am a limping mess. this is frustrating, as one might imagine, for me because i wish everything didn´t hurt so much (although my back and shoulders seem to be doing okay...at least until tomorrow, when they will probably develop a strange rash much like the one on my left ankle) and for anna because she could probably go twice as fast without my poor little limping body.

the only thing distracting me from all my painful ailments is that it is so beautiful here that at least five times a day at a bare minimum, anna or i or both of us stop and just say, "um, can we just pause for a moment and LOOK AT THIS VIEW!?"

as we came over the mountains two days ago, the views from the trail were so spectacular that i was able to momentarily blink back the tears that were forming in my eyes from the pain in my hip and i was able to recognize how incredibly lucky i am to be doing this camino. remember, i was in so much pain at this point that i had to tell myself to take every single step and i still felt this lucky. i spent the night with our canadian friends/trail moms ana and eleanor while anna h. went farther along. the town, el cerdo, has only 14 people living in, which is typical of many of the towns that we pass through. the old woman who owned the supermarket gave us free plums and candy and offered to make us dinner for free. these are the kind of people who you find along the camino. there are new friends every night and locals help point the way every morning as we walk. we can´t believe that we are more than a third of the way through: we only have 10 days or so left! eek!

following us around is a pack of spanish high school students. i can only really describe this phenomenon by calling it a kind of spanish-catholic (is there another kind of spanish?) birthright/teen tour of northern spain that gives spanish high schoolers a chance to gain college credits in exchange for walking the camino. they just sang "knock knock knocking on heaven´s door" with spanish accents. priceless. perhaps they will serenade us tomorrow morning at 5am, as they were kind enough to do this morning. we can only pray. its actually kind of nice to see them everyday.

sophie, this is a comment mostly for you, but all of you pioneer valley kids will understand me when i describe the albergue we are staying in tonight: it looks like a classic leverett house. kind of swiss family robinson meets dirty hippies meets religious icons meets new wave vegetarianism. its pretty rocking/funky. the town we are in tonight, villafranca del bierzo, is an absolutely classically spanish mountian town: tiny winding one way streets that are for some reason two way superhighways of speeding cars, hills all around that are greener than green, and plazas filled with cafes and archways, and everything is on an extreme slant, since the whole town is on a hill.

tomorrow, we head out of town and start up the final mountain. it will take us about three days to get over the mountain, since we are taking a slower pace for my battered body (although anna might want to go faster, right now i literally can´t), but once we are on the other side, we will be in sarria, the last place new pilgrims can technically start the camino, and only 110km kilometers (about 5 days) from santiago.

okay! my turn at the internet is over--another pilgrim awaits her turn. lots of love to all--i find that two and half weeks into being here, what i miss most are your voices and your stories. tell me everything. send me emails. send me baseball scores. the outside world seems very far away.