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!