Camino day ten

Hello again from lovely, sunny, hot Grañon!

So, officially on the way of St. James for a week and a half now. Yesterday I spent the night in Azofra, a small little town in the Rioja region of Spain. Azofra was special because it was the 200 km mark from St. Jean Pied de Port! I have to say, the second 100 were a million times easier than the first 100. I think my body is much better suited to doing this than it was. Sure, my backpack has white lines of dried salt on it from all of the sweat off of my back, my calf muscles have grown so big that I can´t roll my pant legs up, I´m drinking on average 8 litres of water a day and still thirsty, I´m more tan than I´ve ever been in my entire life and my hair is starting to bleach from the sun, and I´ve graduated from 100 mg pills of Pericetimol to 600 mg horse suppository-looking pills of Ibuprofen, but it´s the psychological things that make the difference. I´m taking things at a much better pace I think--lots of little breaks during the day with a moderate walking pace--and I´ve lost the competitive attitude I was treating things with at the beginning. At first when I would see people behind me who were gaining on me I´d think, "Well, people are catching up, time to kick it up a notch so I can stay ahead," but nowadays it´s no big deal. I get passed all the time, but I figure I´ll just go as fast as I can manage, and everyone will get there when they get there.

Today was insanely hot. In Rioja (the region of Spain I´ve spent the past few days in) things actually cooled off a bit, which made walking through the vinyards that cover the region really pleasant, but as I make my way towards the Meseta things are starting to heat up again. I had images of Wilie Coyote chasing Roadrunner down dirt roads in my head from about 12:00 to 2:00 when the bastard Spanish sun was getting really hot, and there were heat waves shimmering and distorting the horizon all over the dry, yellow, dead fields of grain that the Camino passed through. I could see Grañon from about 2-3 kilometers away after I left Santo Domingo de la Calzada, and it was like a mirage in the distance: always on the horizon, never quite getting closer. One of the things I´ve come to notice about the villages here is that no matter how small they are, the buildings are always close together and a minimum of three stories so the inhabitants can get as much shade as possible in the afternoons. Very smart indeed.

Grañon, however, has proved to be quite nice. Tiny town of course, with only a few bars and cafes along the main road, but the albergue I´m staing in here is in fact the attic of the local cathedral, which is just cool as hell. There are sleeping mats all over the wooden floor, and a really classy, big-ceilinged living room right below it with old couches and a long wooden table. Also, it´s donation based, which means it´s about half as expensive and 10 times cooler than a lot of the places I´ve stayed in so far. Not the first church I´ve stayed in either, I stayed in a similar place in Viana.

Some other little tidbits:

-Been hiking with a couple Austrian girls for the past couple days, Leona and Theresa. Theresa just graduated high school, and is spending the next year traveling. First she´s doing the Camino, next spending seven weeks in the US visiting her old host family in Michigan and traveling the east coast, then heading down to Peru to do some volunteer work for eight months. Leona, her friend, is still in school. They´ve been pretty good travel buddies. I think I lost them today unfortunately (they got up pretty early and walked farther than I did today), but they were good walking company, and we spoke 100% German the whole time, which was wonderful. I even got to learn a few little bits of their dialect--nice to learn a different flavor of German for a change.

-A couple days ago a guy came up to me around 7:30 as I was making my way down the trail and introduced himself, asking if I was a native English speaker. I said I was, and he asked if he could walk down the trail with me to the next town. He was 48, formerly worked as a cook, but since the economic troubles in Spain has been without a job. Every morning for weeks now he´s walked this stretch of the Camino looking for people to practice his English with. I figured why not--he was a super friendly guy, actually spoke really great English (a rarity in this country, believe me), just with a super thick Spanish accent. We talked about a lot of things: the Basque country and the complicated politics that goes into that, the Catalán region of Spain, his time in England working as a cook, where I´m from in the USA, his trips to New York City and Washington D.C., it was actually a good time. He bought me a coffee when we reached the next town as a way of saying thanks, and caught a bus back home afterwards. Really nice little interaction actually, I enjoyed it a lot. I´ve had relatively little contact with the actual culture of Spain thus far for lack of speaking the language and always being with other pilgrims, so it was really cool to talk to him and get to know him a little.