Our longest day yet. We were exhausted when we got to our hotel. But so very happy. Some highlights: We met another herd of las vacas on the trail. This time, they were close enough to touch. So close, that we had to move over or be trampled. The farmer herding them was not impressed with the fact that we were peregrinos on the Camino, grunting a curt reply to our “buenos dias,” one of the very few times that we’ve not been welcomed or happily greeted by locals along the way. And the locals who greet us with the

I hit the wall this day, mentally and physically. Kent, too. And it wasn’t like it was our longest day, either. But this day, in addition to our standard “tired,” we added sore and crabby. To add insult to injury, our inn was off the trail by another kilometer, and when we finally had it in our sights, we saw that it was at the top of a hill, and we were standing at the bottom, with at least the length of a football field left to climb. The inn looked cool from afar. It had been built as a

First, I think it’s only fair to point out that our daily mileage count comes from Kent’s pedometer (and if you know Kent, you know it’s been accurately calculated to the nth degree). As such, our mileage includes the “extra” meandering we do at various points, like ducking into a shop, or checking out a cemetery, or the exploration we do when we reach our final destination for the day. But honestly, our “meandering” and “exploration” is fairly limited, given that we’re muy cansada* (very tired) by the end of the day. Anyway, on Tuesday, because we were feeling cocky

We were the only people in the hotel dining room at 8:00pm on the eve of our Camino, having decided on an “early” dinner since we wanted to get a good night’s rest in anticipation of a very long hike. An older woman entered the dining room, sat down and ordered. She was at least a decade older than us, and when she finished her meal and got up to leave, we assumed she was a local, or a tourist who most definitely wasn’t going to be walking the Camino. Her gait was unsteady, stiff and tentative, like a colt

Our first day on the Camino began like an Edgar Allan Poe poem, or something out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. A chill permeated the morning air and dense and heavy fog, like wet cotton, obscured the morning light. We set out alone; one backpack between us, the damp settling onto our shoulders as we hiked down the murky path. And then, she appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, dark hair, pale face, a young woman alone on the trail. “Hey, are you from Milwaukee?” she said, falling in beside us. Damn, I thought. Is our Midwestern accent giving us away

Why is our train going backwards? The announcement over the PA system provided no clues. The rapido delivery of the announcer was no match for my college Spanish. Even when she switched to heavily-accented English, the only words I could make out were “train,” “flood,” and “bus.” Thankfully, a young, bilingual British woman sitting across the aisle filled us in. “The train can’t go all the way to Sarria,” she said brightly, as if this unexpected wrench in our travel plans had won each of us a lottery ticket. “They’re putting us on a bus to get us there.” She

Rising inflation and the last several weeks of a market downturn have some folks really worried. This, despite signs that our economy is beginning to recover from the last two years of an international health pandemic. And those signs of recovery are terrific: the jobless rate has dropped to 4.2%, with U.S. economic output jumping to more than 7% in the last three months of 2021. An economic expansion of 5.7 percent in 2021, the biggest since 1984. U.S. companies showing profit margins higher than they’ve been since 1950. Child poverty cut in half, and more than 4.6 million Americans

It’s always darkest before the dawn. That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. You’ve heard inspirational quotes like these before and you’ll no doubt hear them again. Trite, maybe. But also true. I think that’s why we human beings need to hear them again and again, because the truth always resonates. A few months back, when I wrote about how I was struggling, inspirational quotes are what I clung to, as well as music like This is Me by Keala Settle, or Home by Phil Phillips. Those sayings and songs helped this eternal optimist to remember that underneath it