9 apr

Walked another 45 kilometres today, from Palas de Rei to Santa Irene, making a total of 1416 kilometres.
It was hot. Really hot for the first time while walking in Spain. And then I assume the temperature outside didn’t get above 25 degrees Celsius, about 77 Fahrenheit. I was trying to imagine how it would be to walk here in the summer. The temperatures rise above 40 Celsius (100+ Fahrenheit). I imagine it is only possible to walk in the morning and early evening, but still.
Walking is always about suffering a bit, I wrote in the past. But the past weeks have been pretty easy. No injuries, no blisters, no sickness. Just plenty of energy and a general feeling of being strong. Very pleasant in fact. I know there’s still one day to go, but I want to state here that nobody has passed me on this Camino while I was walking on my own. That’s not completely true. While I was walking out of Pamplona there was a woman who was just walking normally (not jogging or running) who passed me, but then I passed her again, so that doesn’t count.
Just when I was thinking about how strong I feel and how lucky I am to be healthy, I saw a guy with a prothesis standing next to the road. He was trying to gather some money. As far as I could see, just for himself. We chatted for a while in his broken english and my hardly existent spanish. He had been in England for the Paraolympics. He sold T-shirts. The ones in orange and yellow that hurt your eyes. I preferred the orange one, of course, but he only had it in XXL, and I have lost too much weight to look presentable in one of those. They would have been too big before I started walking, I suppose. I wore this T-shirt as a kind of awareness thing all day. Everything is a matter of perspective.
Everything is also relative. On the Camino there are memorials every now and then from people that passed away while walking. Just because there are days that there are so many people on this path, it is just a matter of statistics that some will die, I have always thought when I saw them. But it is natural to stop and to pay a little respect. Most people put a stone near the marker. I just sigh deeply. Today there was a marker for a guy with a British sounding name. When I looked at his dates I found out he was 48 when he died, my age. I went to count further and it was uncomfortably close to the present day in my own life. It was very sunny but I shivered and pulled myself away. Too eerie.
Getting closer to Santiago, there’s some kind of sense that I should have figured out or found everything that I was looking for. Which is nonsense, of course. The amount of time I granted myself to think about things that matter to me, I consider as a luxury. I have enjoyed it. Part of me thinks that I should have stretched myself a little more in the past weeks. But the walks with other people, and the slowing down to their pace, have been very pleasurable too. Much more so than I thought in the beginning. Although, thinking back, the few hours I slowed down to the 2 kilometres an hour pace of Latvian Gaedre (was that her name?) have been the most challenging of this whole Camino.
Santiago has almost been reached. I feel kind of numbed by the idea. I might not have found the things I was looking for, but definitely found things. Not all of them comfortable. But that doesn’t matter. It has been an amazing experience. I am stronger than I thought and weaker than I knew. And then there’s still 21 kilometres to go. I will enjoy every step of it. Even when it starts raining, which chances say is very likely after two days of sunshine.