I opened my emails this AM to find this lovely pic of Our Anamaria on the Camino de Santiago.   This is current as in a few hours old.  Yesterday we had a couple of pics from Burgos of the wonderful cathedral there and then today we are walking westward with the morning sun at our backs.

In a certain understated sensibility, the pic might be entitled “Woman in the Morning Sun” or perhaps “Woman on a Dusty Road”.   But as I look at it this AM with a sort of two cup of coffee practical outlook and knowing that very spot depicted intimately, details and memories are coming forward.  It was just a year ago that I was in that exact location, Kelly at my side or within a kilometer.

Kelly would be grading that road surface as he walked as he graded his students in his past life as a teacher.  I think 5 was the highest which we only experienced one time which was flat and level AstroTurf (artificial grass), a tiny patch in front of a fancy hotel.   The points would go down from there depending on the all the factors which we became intimately familiar with.  So speaking for Kelly here, I would say this is in the low fours.  It looks in the macro sense almost perfect as in level, straight and good width.  But that crushed rock is killer on the bottoms of the feet when unexpectedly a perfect pyramidal shaped rock contacts  your perfectly formed blister and swear words appear that you didn’t realize you possessed.

It is a cloudless sky and the time is late morning and the heat has been building from the comfortable temp at dawn.  There are more windmills than trees, maybe no trees, maybe those are just bushes in the distance, translates to no shade.  It is that time of day for the pilgrim when the early stiffness, doubt and pain have magically disappeared in a second wind of giddiness.   A time to be enjoyed before the eventual exhaustion later in the early afternoon.  And then to be somewhere in the shade when the heat is at it’s worst.

Anamaria seems too fresh after the recent start in Burgos to get into this zone yet but the Meseta stretches on always standing ready to wear you down.   This all sort of sounds like a bad thing to the outsider , the casual observer but it is really one of the blessed obstacles that is there to be wrestled with.

Well out of time, have to go walk myself and I hear a car coming down the gravel driveway, Catherine I think.   Dusty loves, Felipe.