Day 24 : breaking the wall

Day 24 : breaking the wall, originally uploaded by raoul_dewinne.

Although on paper the high and tough mountains were behind us and by now we should be steadily making our way down to lower altitudes, day 24, the penultimate turned out to be the apocalypse. As said before, the last miles are the longest. This deep-carved hilly landscape proved to be a lust for the eye but also a noxiously stinging distress for our already warn-out quadriceps. Today the GPS showed an accumulated ascent of 1150m - the absolute record of this entire trip. All these subsequent hilltops were like an endless rosary, an endless string of beads to count each prayer at each hill climb - a prayer to let us be done with it. If we would have seen only a partial peek preview beforehand of what would be waiting for us, we would never have started. But as with many things in life you better don't know what is ahead of you simply because it would take away the opportunity to learn, to cope and to creatively adapt. As a matter of fact, hill by hill and pedal by pedal we learned to positively accept things the way they were presented to us, even finding joy and meaning in it, not trying to avoid it, not trying to rush to get over with it, not trying to blame it on someone else - simply believing that we will get where we need to be, no matter what, no matter how. Every experience in life has a meaning, a purpose or an advantage - up to us to discover it. We finally broke the wall...



The Spanish weather saint must be a relative of St. James. It might have been a bit too hot the first ten days or so but that has learned us to get up earlier. So far - and the end is near - we have been spared from rain in Spain. For more than 40 years My Fair Lady has been singing that the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain. Based on our experience there could be some truth in that. An advantage of cycling in the mountains? Or at least of cycling the Camino? After the heat wave, Spanish TV now continuously shows tornadoes and flooded areas in other parts of Spain. That's not the kind of stuff you want to be confronted with while riding a bicycle. But also here the skies are packed with heavy dark clouds menacing to pour down on us any moment. So far we escaped miraculously. We witnessed torrential downpours to the left and to the right of us, ahead and behind, but it never hit us. At times it was close, it started to rain heavily while we were just having a coffee or lunch break, then we simply waited till the rain was over to continue our journey. At times we felt the first drops but then we raced as hard as we could to stay ahead of it and reach the hotel kind of dry, kind of... more wet on the inside of our rain jackets than on the outside. Several times the skies were really completely dark around us, except above our head, a narrow open stretch of blue sky... Have we been too long on the Camino that we start to believe in miracles?



Getting closer to Santiago the number of hikers and bikers seems to multiply daily. Not that another miracle is happing, this time there is a simple explanation: the "Compostela" - your ticket to heaven :-) Pilgrims arriving in Santiago de Compostela who have walked at least 100km, or cycled 250km to get there (as indicated on their credential) are eligible for a certificate called the Compostela from the Pilgrim's Office in Santiago. The credential, also known as the pilgrim's passport, is a kind of pass which allows you to overnight accommodation in refugios. It is stamped with the official stamp of each refugio, church or monastery visited - it therefore provides the pilgrim with a complete record of where they passed by. And as it turned out, no matter how far you hiked or biked those Compostelas are all the same. People who only biked 250km almost without any luggage got the same ticket to heaven as those who biked 1600km packed with all their necessities (and unnecesities)... No gold, no silver or bronze medals, no first class or second class diplomas. This must explain the huge numbers of people only doing the minimal final stretch, following the path of least resistance to heaven. Those minimalist walkers were easy to spot: too white legs, too small backpack, too clean shoes, too fresh trousers, too little smell... Reminding ourselves of the wisdom that comparing yourself to others is a sure road to unhappiness, we accepted the idea that everyone is treated equally upon arrival in Santiago ;-) In any case we decided that the gold medal would go to the Swedish guy - no doubt about it - and that we would qualify for silver :-))