time to blog

Recently I was asked by one of our readers why I don´t post. The answer is pretty simple: time. A typical day for us starts at 5.30am. Most of you reading probably can´t remember the last time your kid got up that early. Here on the Camino we do it most every day. Today we were lucky and got to sleep until 6.30. This is to keep us from walking in the heat. Right now we are in the middle of one of the hottest parts of Spain, so finishing before 1.00 is our goal. When we arrive, some of us take a small nap and wash clothes before lunch at 2.00. Sometimes lunch can be a two-hour affair. We need to organize a couple of people to go to the grocery store and prepare food for 13 people. After lunch another nap is usually an order. Right now our bodies are not worn out from any one day of walking, but rather an accumulation of days--something that we have been warning the students from the beginning. After a nap, we check out the towns we are in, which often involves a visit to the local medieval monastery or church.
If Andy and I didn´t work on some of the logistics earlier in the day, it gets done in the afternoon usually when students are still asleep. In general, we have to work through two types of planning: expected and unexpected. We review the route we are going to walk, what we are going to eat and where we are going to stay for the next day. Sometimes that includes a few phone calls to reserve albergues if possible. Then there are the unexpected logistics, which might include any of the following: getting a sick student to a clinic, finding alternative lodging if an albergue is no longer open or likely to be full,and making sure all the students are doing ok in terms of cultural adaptation. Some days the planning takes thirty minutes, most days it takes an hour or two, on bad days it has taken up to four hours. Sometimes we do tag-team work: one person works on one thing, while the other works on something else. We´ve become a very efficient team.
By the time that gets done, it is usually dinner time. We tend to eat at around 8.00, but have eaten as late as 9.00, due to the limited space in the albergues--there isn´t room for everybody to eat at the same time. After dinner most of us head to bed. Some of us spend some time on our feet making sure that our blisters are properly cared for. By 10.00pm most of us are asleep.
Today, being such a short day has been a luxury. Today I found a bit of time to blog and shoot off some emails. Yet it is already 7.00 in the evening and I still need to get to the pharmacy before dinner time, get my clothes off the line,try to call my mom (it´s her birthday today) and do some journaling. In what seems to be such a bucholic life out here in in the Spanish countryside, days seem to fly by.