Day 34 – Hospital Alta De La Cruz to Melide
28k – 742k to date
Today ended up being a very sad day for me. I lost Spot, no not my pet rock Spot, but my GPS tracker that I have had for years. I had the leather covering for the Spot hung onto the backpack and apparently somewhere, it tore off and I did not notice it until I got to my camping spot for the night and reached down to turn it off. I hired a taxi to take me back to the last signal and then up the trail a bit to a bar I stopped at for orange juice. The Spot was nowhere to be found. I left the bar owner a 20 euro bill and gave him my phone number and the name of the place I will be tomorrow night and told him if anyone finds it to call me and I will come back to pick it up. As of now, the tracking page on the blog will not update tomorrow or Saturday as I hope to enter Santiago then. I will say, it was fun tracking for the last month. I hope you used it and enjoyed it.
According to the signs along the trail, I am 51k from Santiago. My guidebook puts it at 53k or about 33 miles. About 30 minutes in a car, 3 hours on a bike or about 2 days by foot. The question raises, am I excited to finish or do I wish it would last longer. Honestly, I have loved this adventure, but I am ready to get back home to family and friends. Sherry is helping me now work on adjusting the travel plans to meet with a Saturday finish. Some of the people I have walked with will take an extra 3 days and walk to the Atlantic ocean to a place called Finisterre, translated, the end of the world. To the original pilgrims, it was the end of their world as they knew it. For me, although I had penciled in the extra days to go there, this adventure is special to end in Santiago and that is what I am comfortable with at this point. That was my goal and that needs to be my stopping point.
The problem with heading back home will be the culture shock from living this simple life to adjusting back to the hectic, fast paced lives we all lead. One of the important things I will take from this adventure is that life can be as simple as we want to make it. I now think the fast paced life is just a state of mind. Over here in what I call the simple life, there are still roles and responsibilities to be carried out on a daily basis, they are just different from our normal ones. If you don’t wash clothes daily then you will lose your dinner and walking partners. You still have to brush your teeth, shower and comb your hair everyday, even though you don’t have to shave. You have to walk to the next stopping point to have a bed for the night and you have to find your food daily, sometimes that takes good planning. So the simple life I have talked about is not without its responsibilities and consequences if not performed correctly. Really, it is just like our current everyday lives, just in a different place and doing a different job. For me, this job over here has been a joy! God has truly blessed me on this journey.
Oh, today’s walk was a great little hike almost entirely equal to yesterday. We are still in the low mountains of Galicia and the immediate scenery is beautiful. There are not a lot of vistas to see as the area is so dense with trees and foliage. Also, the trail is so old and worn down in the moist soil here that much of the time we are walking in a 4′ to 8′ deep trail. The weather for this whole adventure has been wonderful. This was a great time of year to come, but I bet other times of the year also have special weather to offer. Tomorrow will be a hard day of a lot of small ups and downs and a high mileage day to set up the Saturday finish.
Everyone over here is excited and all the talk is about the walk into Santiago. It really is amazing how many people I have seen over the last 4 weeks and how many of those are now converging again as we get close to the goal.
Closer to reaching the finish to a journey.
Proverbs 16:9