Kelly, Rick and I walked eight – nine miles yesterday morning after early Mass.  It was the first time that we had all walked together.  At times I could barely function because of their chatter.  They have known each other for years and they have this way of relating with each other like some long married couple and they are hilarious.  Totally glad that I will only have to deal with them one at a time in Spain!  Kelly will be with me for the first two thirds of my walk and Rick with me on the last third.   Had my second 20,000 step day yesterday.  Kelly is about to break 30,000 any day now.

National Fried Chicken Day went great yesterday.  Rebecca made fried pickles.  And the moose peperoni  was pretty dang good.  I would up talking about the Camino most of the time; what else is new?

OK, so here it is, the ultimate roadhead:  Santo Domingo de la Calzada or St. Dominic of the Pavement (road surface).  Yea, there’s my man!  I learned about him from Esther and he is her favorite saint.  Esther emailed a bunch of info on him and let me sift through that and come up with a bio.  Now, I can see that this will take more than one day so here is the first installment:

The town of Santo Domingo de la Calzada is just west of Logrono.  It is considered by some to be the spiritual heart of the Camino.  So, Dominic Garcia was born in 1019 AD near by.  He was a shy devout shepard boy who some point left to become a monk.  He was humiliated later because he was expelled for not being a good student.  He decided to become a hermit and lived in the forest there.  This forest was infested with bandits who made a living attacking the pilgrims who were slowly making their way on the fledgling Camino.  At this time they basically had to follow the setting sun to move westward.  There was no clear path and they had to swim the many rivers and were easy prey.

Dominic had a dream telling him to serve God by doing something for the pilgrims and this unschooled simple man became the first engineer of the Camino.  He cut down trees to make a trail and built a bridge across the Oja River.  His projects were so big for one man that legend says that angels helped!  More tomorrow, SJA, Phil.