There’s A Lot to be Said for Window Screens

Greetings from Espana! We are one day away from entering the City of Santiago de Compostela and the end of our abbreviated pilgrimage on the Camino. My blogs have been spotty because after walking 8-12 miles every day, it’s hard to focus, let alone be pithy.

For four days, we have been on the Camino with 16 other pilgrims and three guides, all aging from 27 to 88.  Unlike our hiking trip to Croatia last year, my hiking skills have improved, (thank you to my weekend hiking buddies, Jo-Ann and Yuval) and I have moved up from a fledgling member of the JV team as I was last year, to the Varsity, albeit second string. There is one woman who has consistently been the first to complete each day’s hike—by a lot.  In fact, if we didn’t all eat our meals together, I would not be able to pick her out of a line-up, because all I have ever seen was the back of her.  But there are times that my chatting with new friends has slowed my progress. In fact, during one lively conversation in which I seemed to be moving at a snail’s pace, my dear husband waited for me to tell me that I should “step up the pace, because the 88 year old was way ahead” of me.

However, when it comes to hiking wear, we remain on the JV. We got quite a few new things for the trip, but mainly because we took full advantage of Eddie Bauer’s 50 percent end of the year sale.  After being with this crew, that sale wasn’t as good as we thought.  Unbeknownst to us, there is a whole hiking industry that we seemed to have missed. There are rain covers for backpacks ( which would have helped us both during a downpour on the first hour of the first day) gloves for holding walking sticks and ankle covers to protect your socks from mud and dirt—none of which we had. Poor Bob’s backpack is so bad, that his thumb hurts from trying to keep it up on his shoulder. Clearly, if we go on another walking trip, we may have to pay full price for a couple of things!

The hotels have been lovely but it’s been warm and the rooms are often stuffy.  The problem is that air conditioning is not an integral part of every day life here—much to our chagrin.  At one hotel by the sea, our lovely guide told us to just leave our windows open, and we will enjoy the cool breeze and not even think about the lack of air conditioning.

Incorrect.

We did as she said, and not five minutes of turning the lights out, I began to hear buzzing, and it was a bit loud. Lord knows I tried to ignore it, but that is just not in my DNA. I put my rain app on, hoping to drown out the growing noise, but it was all to no avail. At 2:30 AM, i was completely stressed and finally turned on the lights, only to find mosquitoes on all the walls around the bed.  Needless to say, I went nuts.

I began killing them, one-by-one with a tissue, only to see that several hotel guests had already been victim to their ways, because several of their smashed bodies left small blood stains on the wall. Bob, who had slept through the entire ordeal, woke up to a room that looked like a minor crime scene, me standing on the bed splatting the walls and him thinking he needed to shut the windows because it was raining so hard! I then had to “clean up” the crime scene by washing small sections of the walls.  It was 4 am before the “city rain sound” finally worked.

Tomorrow, the reason we came—walking into Santiago de Compostela.