... at least in thought. Maybe it's because I collected up all the various guidebooks and travel narratives about it last night. I have to do a presentation on the the camino in January to the local ladies' reading group so it has been on my mind. It also has been on my mind because this coming spring for the first time in four years, I won't have the rhythm of the camino to look forward to. It's partly because we have finished it, there's little enthusiasm to redo parts of it right now and mostly because the dollar against the euro is so low that we couldn't afford it (1E = $.145).
I ran across this paragraph the other night in an online essay, A Pilgrim, but a Tourist Too by Denise Fainburg:
None of the guidebooks tells you that walking the Camino is something of an extreme sport. It lacks the cachet of, say, sky-diving, but everyone has a tale to tell of pinched nerves, fractures, tendonitis, or the more prosaic blisters. Each evening in the refugios you will see walkers tenderly anointing and disinfecting their feet.
Gee, I have been engaging in an extreme sport all these springs and I didn't even know it!
My feet sure say so. I have lasting effects from walking all those kms and miles. My left foot shows no inclination of completely healing from the plantars fibramatosis; the lump in the arch remains. And the tendon around my ankle that goes to the arch still cramps up. Even with orthotics and switching my exercise activity to rowing which doesn't use the foot in the same way, it's still funky.
But, oh, how I want to walk. How I miss it. The big question is: with what walk in a place that uses the dollar can I satiate that need? I still need to have a long walk to look forward to.
Perhaps I want the walk to know that I am still mentally able to meet such a challenge, to keep on going when it would be so easy to get on the bus and knock off 50 kms in an hour rather than in a day and a half. (In so many of the books I have read of other people's experience, the authors talk about bailing out and taking the bus or train... usually for health reasons, like being too sick to walk from ingesting bad water.) I am glad that I have walked every single inch of that camino, including bonus miles. So I want another like challege as a way of proving to myself that, yes, I am capable of rising to a challenge and finishing it.
[feet, day 2, May 2006 29.5 kms outside of Moissac, France, in Saint Antoine, a week and a half after I broke the pinky toe and fourth metatarsal.]
