Yesterday I went into the local second hand store looking for Jim. Found him in the book section, of course. And in the process I found two Camino books there waiting for me. One Jim made off with and maybe he is reading it this moment on the plane back to New York. The other was an copy of Brierley’s “New Lightweight Edition” Pilgrim’s Guide (2007). And we all know Brierley, the most ubiquitous darn thing on the Camino Frances next to blisters.

And this book is hardly lightweight. I mean for a library reference book it is lightweight but that’s all I can say for it. I carried a map book maybe 1/3rd the weight. It actually went across twice as Catherine y Dana carried it this spring. As I look at it sitting on the table in front of me it is a wreck, bombed and strafed from stem to stern. It is sweat soaked and sort of curled up looking most three dimensional and one corner looks like it was chewed on.

Anyway back to the Brierley, which weighs 13.3 oz by the way, according to Our Jennifer’s food scale. And what if we played around here for a minute with some math? I was thinking just how much energy does it take to carry this little unit the 500 miles across Spain on the Camino. That would be .831 pounds X 2,640,000 feet = 2,193,840 foot pounds of energy for one book. A foot pound is a measure where 1 equals moving 1 pound a distance of 1 foot.

So, I have heard that there are 200,000 pilgrims walking each year. What if 100,000 carried this guide all the way across. Just a very rough guess since lots don’t make it all the way across in a single year and not everyone carries it. So, it is just a wild guess. So now we have 100,000 times 2,193,840 ft/lbs equaling 219,384,000,000 foot pounds of energy.

So what does this mean, well, I don’t know but it’s a lot of energy. Perhaps that’s enough to move the Santiago Cathedral one hundred meters. Or perhaps it is enough to move the Vatican one meter. I don’t know why we need to do either of those but if we did… Or perhaps it’s enough to launch an albergue and put it in orbit around the moon, a place to stay. That makes more sense.

Well so much for math. Time to go. Alperfect really, love, Phil.