Pondering…

The thing with being in a different country with a language barrier, is when you see something amazing or some funny sites with descriptions on a sign beside them, you can not read to know what it is – you are only left with your imagination to think what or why that is there or happening… This can be useful at times especially as my interpretation of church or museum history is so much better than the audio tour – just ask Ally 🙂

This also happened in Astorga, a large town in its last days of a medieval festival! Sounds exciting I know 🙂 We were! But when you walked thru the tents and site with nothing happening except people standing around in traditional medieval attire doing nothing… you start to wonder what exactly is going on?? And I guess we will never know 🙁 even after the excitement of seeing our Spanish friend Fran again and with his little to no knowledge of the English language he couldn’t understand or explain it to us either…

It rained also (thank god once we had stopped for the day) but the coats came out because with it came the cold wind… We are entering the mountains again, new tracks for our feet (which continue to argue with their punishment some times during each day – but it’s getting less and less so they are obviously getting used to it) I’ve joined Ally with sandals on today and my feet went well 🙂 this maybe a boring part of our story for you, but to us we can have a good hour conversation about them! Even spending time inspecting closely to see what has changed fearing for blisters… Priorities change on the Camino and our top 3 each day are:

• Water
• Feet
• Sunscreen
• & another is – Ice Cream – God help us if our stop for the night doesn’t have ice cream (or vino)

So as the terrain starts to change again, trees appear, mountains appear in the distance (great that means we have to climb them) and our attitude changes also. Reaching the half way point of our journey (not in distance but in time) we’ve both begun to saviour every moment as it is all coming to an end too soon 🙁 let’s not dwell on that – we have Santiago to get too!!!

Saying that, it seems possible now – there have been times over the past few weeks where we have doubted if it could be done – we were told right about the physical pain you feel, the metal games that go on in your head, it’s all true but each day you get up strap on your bag and go because it is what you want to do – need to do.

Looking forward to the next few days 🙂 More milestones to achieve:

• The Iron Cross is coming up where we leave our thoughts, hopes and stones we’ve been carrying with us since the beginning.
• Castles to visit with a grand history of the Knights of the Templar
• Crossing into the Galicia region of which the capital is Santiago de Compostela!

We will keep you posted

Buen Camino!