The two Swedish women are only going a short distance tomorrow. One of them told us she had “Blasen” on her feet. Her partner used English. “Bloody blisters.”
The increments in the Camino guide books are all around twenty miles. Of course everything is in kilometers, which I think of as short miles. (like Euros are expensive dollars.) It is not a walk in the park. The two German guys that were drinking wine from the free spigot when we last saw them passed us this morning. We commented on how big their packs were. And then we passed them. They were sitting under a tree, putting some sort of lotion on their bare feet. We can’t seem to shake the two Italian women. They have been in every town we are for the last few days. An English florist, traveling by herself, keeps popping up as well but we haven’t seen that Kentucky woman, the one who’s doing the Camino for the second time by herself, in days. And May may never see that Brazilian couple again. We had the same sense of humor.
That’s the funny thing about this trip. A random group starts every day, all from the same town at the French border, and we all do it at our own pace so we are continually overlapping and meeting new people, hardly ever by name, and then they are gone. You meet, mostly in a cafe. On the trek it is simply “Hola.” We’ve crossed paths with this Asian guy at least a half dozen times and the only thing he has ever said to us is “Buen Camino.”
I eavesdropped tonight on a conversation between two guys speaking Spanish. Neither of them were native speakers, both were from different countries, but Spanish is the universal language. Or at least it should be. It is certainly the loving tongue.
2 Comments
This is the walking version of your music. Continual improvisation, with thematic elements arriving & departing. Things becoming familiar just as they disappear. And the instinctive drive to keep it all in motion, pushing forward. It will be interesting to see what Margo Explo sounds like after all of this.
Thank you Duane. I love this analogy.