Highs:
- Landing in Madrid and shipping half of my belonging to the end of the Camino and my bag being half the size it usually was.
- A nice man pointing us in the right direction to our first Albergue and getting our Camino Passports!!
- Every morning taking an update video and rambling on and on about what we were experiencing.
- Coffee and Tostadas (toast) every morning.
- Meeting people from all over the world (Ireland, England, USA, Italy, India, Australia, Poland, Germany, France, Spain, Bulgaria, Korea, and the Netherlands.)
- Stopping frequently along the way and loosing track of time because of the conversations we were having.
- the routine of the camino. wake up, pack up, walk, eat breakfast, walk, get a snack, walk, stop and sit on a bench or take a short nap, walk, check into the Albergue, shower, nap, eat dinner, sleep, repeat.
- stopping in all the small churches that were open to look around.
- Being blessed by a priest with holy water, and a necklace from a sister in the church.
- A nun asking if I wanted prayer and she prayed in tongues over me, and Courtney
- staying in an albergue run by nuns and sharing in the community dinner.
- stumbling upon a farmers market in four or five towns along the way.
- eating a vegan meal and drinking wine at one of our first Albergues.
- legs up the wall and stretching time
- making morning highlight videos.
- buying sun hats from the traveling farmers market we kept running into.
- having time and space to process the ten months previous and time to think about what was to come.
Lows:
- Courtney’s phone getting stolen while she was sleeping on a park bench.
- The first three days being the sorest I have been in my life.
- Deb injuring her foot so badly that we had to send her in a cab two towns ahead to get it checked out.
- Arriving to an Albergue and realizing that there is no market in the town and we didn’t have any food for dinner, so we ate pasta from the free bin with oil and tony’s creole seasoning that I had been carrying with me.
- forgetting to ask some of the people we met to take pictures with us or ask for facebook or contact info.
Bozos:
- Starting to walk the first day and getting lost and no one pointing us in the right direction. then reading later that supposedly that city was well marked. Either we were terrible at following signage or we missed the signs. (we learned later that they tend to put signs in places people don’t typically think to look.)
- getting about 15 minutes into our walk the first day and Courtney’s ankles swelling to double the size and her rash getting worse by the minute. So we gave her some Benadryl and let her sleep it off on a park bench.
- Figuring out that we could only walk roughly 21 kms without becoming the most dramatic people on the planet.
- When you decide to sit on a bench and talk for 1.5 hours you end up getting passed by a mom with her stroller who is walking the camino as well. And you don’t catch back up until you are in town.
- playing charades and using the little Spanish I know to try and buy an ankle brace, and all I kept saying was, “Mas fuerte” (stronger) Thankfully she understood what I needed.
- Standing in the shower for twenty minutes because the water is dripping down the wall rather than spraying out like a normal shower.
- Thinking you were picking the best beds when really there is a lamp outside that never turns off all night and there is no curtain on the window.
- Sleeping in a room with 46 other people and they close all the windows to the room. When I got up to pee in the middle of the night there was easily a 20 degree difference between the hallway to the room. GROSS!
- after walking on of our hardest days people were freaking us out as we arrived in town saying there were no more beds in that town. The next town was another 4 kms away and we did not want to walk that. So Courtney held our spots in line for the donations based Albergue while I went and checked out a 7 Euro Albergue. We ended up getting beds in the 7 Euro albergue and we were told we got one of the last two beds, when in reality there was a whole other room full of beds. we freaked out for nothing. whoops.
- bees would land on Courtney’s yellow sun hat and would rub their bodies all over it thinking it was a flower. Every time they would land Courtney would swat them away yelling “I’m still not a flower.”
