Notes From Jerri

October 23

We are back in body, if not in mind (or in blog entries).  There is, of course, far, far more to tell about this trip than we can ever let be publicly known.  I am sure Karen has much more to add, and I will put in a few details here and there, so don’t give up following us.  I did not read any of Karen’s blogs while we were in Spain and only now have had the chance to see what she did.  Amazingly, she managed to keep you all pretty much up-to-date on where we were and our general condition, despite terrible WiFi access and one-finger typing, often in the dark or in weird places.  And she was restricted to whatever pictures she could take on her camera phone, as we couldn’t download my camera to hers.

We’ll try to fill you in on more details, but here are a few that come to mind.  My “rental shoes” (as Beth calls them) actually lasted quite well until the last week.  I didn’t get any blisters until the inside linings started to disintegrate, and then I got one really horrible, bloody blister (the kind where you can’t walk, talk, or sleep) over the side of one foot ON THE LAST WALKING DAY.  Between the two of us, we used up all but a few tablets of the 500 mg ibuprofen I brought on the trip.

At the airport on the way home, my backpack with everything in it weighed 6.3 kg (13¾ pounds) and I can assure you that everything weighs quadruple what the scale says when you are carrying it around on your back all day, every day.  We had one day (the last) without our backpacks and poles and we both felt so off balance, we actually had difficulty walking.

Karen (being a much nicer person than I am) wrote a very benign account of our fun two weeks in Pamplona with Beth in the hospital.  I am here to tell you that medicine in Spain is just like in the USA and you don’t want to experience it if at all avoidable.  I felt like I was at work except that it was all in Spanish.  Our language skills improved dramatically, just not with the vocabulary we would have desired.  And we won’t go beyond merely mentioning our experiences with the (US) insurance company.  Just thinking about that makes the steam start to emanate from my ears.  But I finished knitting 14 baby hats through the experience, if that gives you any idea.

I wrote a journal every day and filled up three books of comments.  And that couldn’t really capture the experience; I was just able to try to write down enough hints to remember stories to tell later (and I have many).

In case you are wondering if we are transformed by this experience, I can’t speak for Karen except to say she is skinnier and a lot browner.  As for me, I look exactly the same except I am never, ever wearing those clothes again.  Lots of beer and wine kept my weight up and I already had white hair before we started. Mostly, it is hard to believe we actually did the whole thing.  We walked far more than 500 miles and, like many people we met, we were actually sort of sad to see the trip end.