AN UPDATE AND PART ONE IS ON VIDEO

Here's a little update of sorts of things I forgot to tell you about and perhaps a final post. (We'll see about that).  If you followed on Facebook you might remember this guy on the left.  

I kept running into him along the way.  Almost everyday we would bump into each other.  At first I thought he was from Germany, but another pilgrim told me he's from Belgium.  I would walk into a town bar and there he would be.  It happened so often it became funny.  We would each feign displeasure of having run into each other once again.  We rarely spoke, but just shook our heads.  One day we actually sat at the same table for breakfast and there was hardly any conversation.  I asked his name, but he suggested that upon arrival in Santiago that we should tell each other our names and have dinner together.  Since we saw each other everyday, I said I would plan on it.  Well, the last time I saw him was when I took this photo.  I had another day off in the works and I think he just kept on going.  Before any of you say that I should have introduced myself, understand that he was not in the getting to know one another mood.  Anyway, we had a few laughs over several weeks acting with disdain each time we met.  Sad I never saw him again.

When I walked the Camino in 2015, I had lunch in a bar/albergue in the small village of Fonfria.  I left my pack outside and sat inside enjoying my empanada  and ice tea.  It's typical when you eat in a bar to order your food at the bar and pay when you are done eating, again at the bar.  On this day I forgot to pay.  I went outside, put on my pack and started down the hill.  After about an hour, I realized my mistake.  After some consideration I decided that I just didn't want to walk back up the hill and pay my bill.  When I arrived at my next overnight spot, I sent a message to a fellow pilgrim who was a day behind me asking her to stop and pay my bill.  Well, I later learned that she didn't stop.  So, I figure on this Camino, it was time to pay up.  So I stopped, ordered an empanada and an ice tea and sat down.  Using translate on my phone, I told the bartender, who was the same guy of my earlier crime, that I wanted to make amends.  He laughed and laughed.  He then told his mother, also working behind bar, what I had said, and she too laughed and laughed.  He told me it wasn't necessary to pay them back, but then I told them how I had come to Spain and walked over 300 miles to pay my debt.  He finally acquiesced by charging me double for my meal.

As you probably guessed, walking 440 miles takes a lot of footsteps.  Placing one's foot in front of the other day after day gets sort of memorizing at times, especially on long straight stretches.  Got me to thinking about Kurt Koontz's book about walking the Camino, A Million Steps.  Is it really a million steps?  I really didn't want to start counting, but it came to me one day that an app on my phone was doing it for me.  So on the plane ride home I opened the app and added up all the steps on the days I was walking.  It came to 1,217,037 steps.  Quite a bit more that Kurt's one million, but he's a big tall guy and probably covers more ground with each step.  Now, some of my steps were probably attributed to my taking the longer road several times and of course there's always walking out out your way looking for bars.  Anyway it's a lot of steps.

I published on YouTube part one of this Camino.  Turns out I've got lots of footage so I'm breaking the video up into to 3 or 4 parts.  Part one is below, and future installments will be published as I complete them.  Might be a week or two between installments, as editing the videos is very time consuming. Anyway, enjoy Part One.