“ 880 km later…
We´ve finished!!!!
We´ve been to the end of the world, and it was cold and rainy the whole time. BUT, it was an amazing feeling to have made it so far, something like 880kms in 36 days, and we bought champagne to celebrate (well, a 2€ cava doesn´t really count as champagne…). So, we spent one day in Santiago at a pilgrim´s mass where the priests swing a massive 54kg incense burner over the heads of the devout (really impressive, but too touristy to be in a church, in our opinion), enjoying ourselves and taking a break, then we walked the four days (90km more) to Finisterre where we sat in the rain on the rocks of the furthest edge of the Old World, contemplating our lives and what we had done to get to where we were. We´re currently back in Burgos, one of our favorite cities, getting ready to make a journey back to Saint Jean Pied-de-Port to pick up our stuff and then we´re journeying on to Tarbes for a 10-day helpx with a French-English couple before heading to Germany for 5 days to see Karl, Andrew´s good friend who´s at university there for a year. We´ll try to post some photos when we get some more time, but just wanted to let you know that we´ve finished el Camino and we´re very happy/at peace with the world and we´re on our way to the next adventure. See you all in the coming weeks, we hope!
Love and smiles to all of you!!!
…meaning we have only 310km left on the Camino! It´s hard to believe we´ve done 400 plus already, but we are planning to finish somewhere around the 13th of September. We´ve been having a good time with our traveling companions, though most are surprised that we walk so fast. Andrew´s reasoning is pretty sound, “if you don´t walk fast in our American cities, you get run over.” We´ve had amazing luck running into one day only Spanish festivals: so far we´ve been to a running of the bulls, a Ricky Martin wannabe concert, a tomato throwing fest, a make your own floatable contraption race, end of fiesta dances…it´s all in the life of a pilgrim. :) Thinking of you all a lot, and getting really excited to see everyone when we get back home!
Yay, first day on the Camino de Santiago finished. We walked through the clouds up a mountain pass rising 1200 metres throughout the day. We´re sunburned but happy, and we´re off to bed by 10pm. More to come and pictures too!!!
“ Took a free “taxi” on a 9 hour overnight journey from Cappadoccia to Istanbul this morning and are spending another day or so here. The plan is to then take an overnight bus to Sofia, Bulgaria, where we will catch a flight to Milan, take a train from Milan to Nice, Nice to Bordeaux, Bordeaux to Bayonne, Bayonne to Saint Jean Pied de Port. Then we walk 780km along the Camino de Santiago. Photo updates to come of the past few weeks.
