There is some significant construction going on here at the Caminoheads blog.  The lovely Hanna is working away on it but glitchs show up.  Glitchs R Us I think just in general, nothing to do with Hanna.  Annie and I realized this over the weekend, that Glitchs R Us.

Well I am not going to invest a lot of time into this test.  I will try and publish this and see what happens.   Miss you, love you, let’s do it all again, Felipe.

Still trying to figure things out here at Caminoheads.  Had a post written this AM but it got eaten and never could find it.  So, will try again.  Thought I would get some news out to folks that may show up to walk Phil’s Camino while Phil is gone.  I am off gallivanting Saturday through Tuesday.  I’ll miss the Sunday afternoon walk and the Monday morning one.  But you are welcomed me to come if you know the way.  
So, I’ll be getting the blog out from San Francisco hopefully.  Will make sure you get all the important news.  Still in love, Felipe.x

Cool Old Guy with Old Friend Ivette, May 2016

Daring Lisa at the Apple Store got me rigged up with an app to write my blog posts on.  It sounded like a good idea at the time.  And it probably will be once I figure out all the details.  Yea, she’s up and gone and here I am the next morning with questions.  Yea, like how to get a pic on my posts.  We may be pic less for a while, pic less in Seattle.

Anyway, I could whine about that or we could go somewhere else.   I know, we are off to San Francisco Documentary Festival (SF Doc Fest) this weekend.  Annie will be there and we will be traveling with Father Tom Hall.  I hear that he is giving Mass at Old Mary’s Cathedral on California St. Sunday morn.  We actually will be staying there on the grounds.  Somehow Padre Tomas got us rooms there.  Connects baby!  

We will be on hand for questions and answers at the two showings, one Saturday afternoon and the other Monday evening. We are in a group of short documentaries called “Cool Old Guys”.  All this is on the Doc Fest website.  So, if you are in the neighborhood or have friend there, give them a heads up.  

Cool Old Guys
Ok, I don’t know about Cool Old Guys but do know about old guys.  Have to get out there and walk in a moment, get the old guy out there.  It rained over night so wear your boots for the wet grass if you are coming.  Cool Old loves, Felipe.x

yup. 

Yes, at the Apple Store being helped by Lisa to get to a place with my blog that is streamlined and doable.   So maybe a few more lines and then I will try and add a pic and see what happens.

I was grouchy yesterday and it had to due with me being locked out of my own blog site.  Finally, at 2345 I was able to get in to post Sherif’s thoughts on blisters.  I didn’t want a day to go by without a thought going out to you.

So, hopefully, things will run smoothly now.  The spam is gone which is huge and other things are happening.  THE BLOG CONTINUES!!

Right now the sun is out and I am going to get out there and get somethings done.  This  will be a shorty.  Let it be enough to say that I am totally happy being here with you and doing what we do.  I get grouchy when I think that it will be otherwise.  Love you, Felipe.

Blisters.. Ampollas if I didn’t miss the right Spanish translation

After a long busy week, I headed north to Alexandria for a break. Sitting on the hammock in my friends’ garden, my eyes caught a scar on the back of my feet. I bent to see what it was. Simply a scar left from the blisters that hit my feet during the Camino. I did not see it well recently.

Wow, am recalling memories here! Memories of night blister-treatment circles, arranged by pilgrims with some interesting music and bottles of wine, while everyone is treating their feet to stand up for another long walk next morning.

We used to sit and share medical tools and tips. Some would suggest using Compeed plastic plasters, others suggested normal plasters, and some even suggested just leaving them alone. Wear 2 socks, no just one wool sock, ok don’t take a shower in the morning to keep them dry, put Vaseline, put benzoyl …aaaaah what should I really do ???

It was a very confusing experience cause all what you want was to wake up and walk the next morning, but the precious thing about it was how you got to understand your body and what it needed more than ever. You totally disregard all what you read and what you were told, and create a personal way of comforting yourself according to how you studied your body by midway.

Just recalling the tons of posts about wearing a hiking shoes or hiking boots and some suggested athletic ones, at the end I used my sandals most of the way.

The blisters experience, taught me how to tolerate some pains to achieve a goal, starting from too much complaining, that many of you would remember me always complaining from my blisters, into believing that they became another credential that a pilgrim would receive aside from the ones stamped on the camino passport! I bet there were real stamps that cannot be faked.

Today I wish these scars would never leave my feet as they carry a lot of memories. Today I am wondering how many pilgrims are looking at their feet and remembering the good days through these scars, although many ladies worked on removing them in Santiago before going back home, but they have all their right and our blessing ….Buen Camino 🙂

Sherif, Cairo.

 

Well , there is a close up of the strange veggie.  It’s been sitting in water on our table for a few days now and I am totally fascinated by it.  Notice how the big cone shapes are laid out in spirals and lines of the cones are orientated in two different patterns, both spirals.  And then on those cones the smaller cones that cover those are laid out in this interlocking pattern of intersecting spirals.  So cool.  And then on these little cones the same thing occurs in miniature.  And maybe on and on.

This is the same interlocking pattern that is in the layout of the sunflower seeds on the sunflowers in Spain that we walked endless kilometers through.  Look at the pics.  And this is the pattern that is used on some of the great old cobble stone streets in the cities there.  Remember?  I’ll have to look through my photo album for that.  Kelly was always taking pics of the walking surfaces.    Last Sunday we had Will and Jasper  (www.greenmanfarm.com) over for dilly dally and din din and Will put a name on that phenononym, calling it an interference pattern.  Well, we will just have to Google that.

So, recently, I in a post I was describing Rebecca’s tapas as rugged.  That was just a word that shot out of my brain on first glimpse.  It was because she had some delectable goodies on the plate but some were standing up giving it this great 3-D look.  My tapas are always very lounge -y.  Like the little slices of cheese and the olives are having a little dilly dally of their own after a long day in the frig.  Very relaxed but maybe slightly giddy just because they enjoy each other’s company.  I’ll have to Google “lounge-y tapas”.

OK, since I like to do things in threes, I’ll have to mention some good Camino reading that I was doing last evening.  There is some great stuff on this blog:  aviatrixKim.wordpress.com  .  Two things that I looked at that were really good were: 8 Ways to be a Kinder, Gentler Pilgrim and  you Might Be Pilgrim If: .  Yea.

And final note that Ken my awesome Apple guy and general all around good guy (has wooden bead rosary hanging out of his pocket) stopped the flow of spam into this site.  It is a miracle!  I was getting over two hundred a day and worse than that some  were getting to be like old friends.

OK, you lounge-y tapa characters, I love you immensely, shoot me a comment once in a while.  I might be able to find them now that the spam is gone!  You’re the best, Felipe.

 

Yea, I have to admit that my personal Camino has been a little rough lately.  And I know that is the way it is and I need to be present, keep walking and it will flatten out again.  Right, that is the way it is set up, that nothing lasts forever.  Laura says that we need Patience (always capitalized now).  I have to quit kicking the Coke machine looking for faster results.  So look back to October 23rd to see the post about the Coke machine appearing out of the fog if you have forgotten.

So, yesterday, my stars were really lined up I guess, and a great day appeared out of nowhere.  The trail flattened out for the time being and I had a great time with great people.  Yea, the old great people thing again.   We need to hold each other close as it is amazing how much good influence we can exert on each other.

So, it started out with a Skype with Gracie in London.  It was a short one because I needed to run off to Seattle for my big chemo treatment day.  She is such a Sweetheart and never fails to get me going.  Then at the hospital my doctor, the receptionists, the schedulers and the bevy of great nurses never fail to give me the chuckles.  So, I got about five hours in a comfy chair while the strange chemicals go coursing into my 175 pounds.  But I always bring stuff to do and drink coffee and take advantage of the time to work on the blog or work on a book or try to flag down a nurse that has computer savvy to get some free advice.  Then I get done at 4:30 and jet out of their to beat the worst of the afternoon rush.

So far so good, right?  So I get to the ferry and I get to cut into the line because I have a pass from the hospital (special depensation).  And who do I run into but my old hunting buddy John who is incredibly talented as a writer, song writer, musician and other stuff.  He is our resident fisherman poet who I never get to spend enough time with.  So I got a half an hour to do just that.  And he starts telling me about his latest song that he wrote about Ebola.  Only John could pull something like this off tastefully. So that was great checking in with him.

So, I make it home and Rebecca has whittled out some great looking tapas which I characterized as rugged and she laughed.  She laughs a lot.  And she brought this strange new veggie home see pic.  I’m calling it Intergalatic Broccoli. It has the most amazing geometry based on the spiral.  And some try to tell us that there is no God.

So we have venison in mushroom sauce by Rebecca and a glass of red and the phone rings and it’s another of my favorite people who like John the fisherman poet, is  Stephen the cowboy chef.  So, he says, ” Lucky, I just made this deer liver pate and I’m bringing it over so you can check it out.  Are you going to be there?”  Man, my stars are members of the Indiana University Marching Band.

So, no coincidences right?  It’s all in the plan, right?  Just have to be Patient and let things unfold, right?  Something that we learned on the Way of St James, right?  Hold me close, love, Felipe (aka Lucky).

 

 

A pic Kelly took and I can’t remember where it was but a church yard.  I stared at these artifacts for a long time.  Together, a baptismal vessel and a sarcophagus, bot

h chiseled out of stone.  The real thing.  Nice little tableau of life, well the beginning and end anyway.  And what about the in-between?  After we acknowledge God, love Him and your neighbor, is it possible to have too much fun?  Really?  Well, let’s just say that we on our section of the Camino tried our best!

(I just want to say that the sarcophagus though plain and looking oh so final had a loving feature that I observed.  You can’t really see it because of the angle of the sun but  the area where the head goes is raised in a little pillow so the occupant will be comfortable resting there.   Sweet don’t you think? )

There are points where a casual observer would think that we were having too much fun. How about a few things that I could come up in a minute: the sunflowers, the swallows, the Eagles, the roses.  The picnics.  The free wine fountain, the tapas, the wine with every meal. (The waiter would bring you wine almost automatically but you had to ask for water.). This lead to the evening when we were actually louder than the Italians.   The nuns smiling, the priests blessing you continually, the s

ky blue and the wheat golden. Excellent company to pass the kilometers. We did laugh a lot when we weren’t crying. Sunrises, sunsets, clouds to shade us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

OK, I am having way too much fun writing this.  And I am sitting in the comfy chair at Swedish Hospital getting my chemo treatment.  Love you all immensely, Felipe.