Day VIII: Arcade -> Caldes del Reina; 22.4mi.

🛏:

10€

After (nearly) two caminos under my belt, here are some skills I now possess:

How to use miles and kilometers interchangeably (spoiler: kilometers pass more quickly but there are more of them). • How to live my daily life with a giant backpack attached to my back – I’m talking squat on the trail, navigate crowded streets and grocery stores, etc. It became a part of me. • How to wash my undergarments while taking a shower (mind you the shower doesn’t stay on, it’s like those sinks where you need to push down on the spicket for the water to flow. It turns off every .03 seconds. Also the water is cold). • How to recognize people by their backpacks; bonus points because I can correctly guess what country someone is from based on the brand of their backpack 73% of the time. • There’s more. But if being proficient at those things isn’t impressive, I don’t know what is.

Today we started out our trek at dawn. I ate my final from-home energy bar as I walked and I reminisced about the origin of that bar as I did so — exactly two weeks ago today, I rode the train back from the Chicago Basin to Durango, Colorado. As my climbing partner and I boarded the train with our fellow backpackers, a friend we’d met on the trip casually asked me if we had happened to see the bag of food he left on Mt Eolus. I couldn’t stifle my laughter as I pointed to my climbing partner rummaging through said bag. He’d already rationed a small portion of the snacks he didn’t want to me.

We all had a good laugh about it and my climbing partner and I were instructed to keep what we had already divided up — finders keepers at 14k feet, I guess, because I don’t know anyone who would climb back up a mountain for snacks after that four-mountain-day we logged. But they were some damn good snacks.

And they were the majority of what came with me here as they were still in my bag when I quickly turned around and packed for this trip (got home from backpacking at 0300, began a 48hr work shift at 0700, left for Portugal the next day after my shift. Typical Kate).

I digress, it was another rainy day today. Far worse than the first one. My friend and I stuck our headphones in and walked quickly. It was both the fastest average speed of the trip to date and the furthest we have traveled.

Our mission was to make it to a town 22.3mi away so that we could celebrate one of my original friends’ birthdays with him. They gained a town on us two days ago and we hadn’t seen them since.

We stopped for a quick lunch and that was about it for breaks, just walking and music and thinking and rain.

For the record, I have no idea how neither of us have gotten hit in the head by a falling acorn yet this trip. There have been about one million close calls. Every time that happens, I think of my dog and the last backpacking trip we were on together. A squirrel taunted him by knocking acorns out of the tree above us and it was quite entertaining. I miss that little monster. I’ve resolved, even before this trip, that the next major thru-hike I do should be one he can join me on. In the early stages of looking into the PCT 2021, we’ll see.

We made it to our hotel at 5pm, achy, exhausted and drenched, but happy to be here and to join in on the birthday festivities of the friend who is, truthfully the reason I’m here at this exact time, experiencing these exact things.

Now we’re curled up in our beds in our cozy private room, making plans to “sleep in,” (8am) tomorrow and for our second to last day of walking. Wild.

We’re coming for you, Santiago.

🎒:

I have a million mile long saga about shoes. To summarize: I didn’t really care about them until my last camino. I never did anything long enough or regularly enough for shoes to matter much. I had a decent pair of Solomon’s for day hikes and that was it. For my last camino, I bought some reasonably priced shoes that fit okay and didn’t think much more of it. As it turns out, your feet swell some when you walk eighteen miles a day for twenty-eight days (well maybe yours don’t, but mine sure did). Long story short, I wore chacos for nearly half of my last camino. They saved my butt (and my feet) and I’ve sworn by them since.

After a lot more shoe errors throughout my summer of climbing, I stumbled upon the Keen Terradoras. What they lack in durability (and if I’m being honest, traction), they make up for in comfort and the width necessary to accommodate my feet; and at this point, I’ve accepted comfort trumps all even if it means buying a few more pairs of hiking shoes than the average hiking-human.

I did bring my chacos on this trip in case of another emergency. I’ve worn them as shower shoes and that’s about it. If I could do it all over again, I would have left the chacos home this time and brought a lighter, cheaper, shower shoe instead.

🎶:

The Maine; You Are OK. Listened to these guys some in high school. Forgot about them. They released this album earlier this year. I’m obsessed, 10/10. 🤘🏽