day 12: castrojeriz (between burgos and leon)

so we've entered the pre-teen years of our journey, and things are continuing without too many tantrums and we've miraculously avoided the awkward growth spurt. then again, i was kind of a late bloomer.

i have 5 minutes here, so let me spell out for the curious our more or less daily schedule:

5:15 alarm segueing into final preparations for the day: breakfast
6:00 (ideally) rubber on road
6:00 -9:00 follow yellow arrows and signs with seashells along El Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage route that is older than any of the nations it crosses
9:00 take off our packs, apply sunscreen, eat 4 or 5 muffins and some fruit, stretch
9:00 - until we're tired: one foot in front of the other
when we're tired: take a little break, drink liters of water, stretch
after the stretch: follow yellow arrows (seriously, if a yellow arrow led into a bottomless manhole, i would jump into it without scruples)
we usually arrive into our destination between 12:00 and 14:00, depending on mileage (we're averaging about 27-28 km a day, pushing ourselves up to 36 on one occasion, resting the sore and blistered feets with a 21 earlier in our diaper days)
we then check into the albergue, a variation on a barrack facility, eat our lunch (without fail: bread, cheese, chorizo sausage, fruit), and proceed to afternoon activities.

afternoon activities:
sitting there
sleeping
reading (i'm in the middle of canto VI of dante's inferno in italian and loving it)
stretching, attending to minor medical concerns
hobbling around the town in search of physical sustenance, the silence of church spaces
eating
chatting with our fellow pilgrims in a variety of broken languages and hand gestures
talking about what we want to eat when we get back to AMERICA

8:30-9:30 in bed and excited to be there.
rinse and repeat.

these days are full of reflections on the many blessings in my life, not the least of which that there are people out there who are reading this and thinking of us. thoughts and prayers, to avoid confusion in the vastness of the cosmos and meta-cosmos, should include full names: Carl Claude Adair and Patrick Michael O'Brien.