Media (14)
Mission day: Happy Birthday trail.
June 19, from Navarrete to Ciruena.
I was on a mission: I wanted to leave before Catherine to have time to place the shells. Shortly after 6 in the morning I was already on the move.
Around 7:20 I left the first shell 200/300 meters before arriving in Ventosa. To make it clearly visible to Catherine, but not too obvious for others, I placed it right along the trail under a tower of stones built on purpose: under the tower I left an empty space where I inserted the shell with a little candy as a sweet surprise.
I made the second drop around 8:20, about 5 km later, in front of a grape field.
The third at 9:30, after another 5 km, a few kilometers before Najera.
At 10:00 Catherine sent me the photo of the first shell, saying she had just arrived in Ventosa. At 14:20 she wrote that she had found them all and that she would stop in Najera because of foot pain.
At that moment I was already at the next village, about 10 km ahead: I had arrived in Azofra around 11:30 and had stopped to wait for her. I asked her to reach me and that I would wait, but she explained that the foot pain was there every day and that on that day it had started from the very beginning of walking: she really could not continue. She also wrote that she would have liked to drink another beer together, but she had already booked there.
Too bad: I had not considered that on her birthday we would not see each other. I thought that, once the shell hunt was over, we would meet in the afternoon or evening. It went differently: she stopped in Najera, I was in Azofra. Chris had asked me to wish Catherine a happy birthday: we had met Chris the day before on the Camino, together with his wife Jessica, a nice American couple. Realizing that I would not see Catherine all day, I forwarded the wishes to her via WhatsApp.
Around 14:30, once I understood she would not arrive, I decided to start again and push quite a lot. The sky was cloudy and rain was expected for the next day: better to gain kilometers that day so I could walk less in the rain the day after. I had set Santo Domingo as my goal, but in the end I stopped earlier, in Ciruena. Meanwhile Thomas had reached Burgos: by then he had escaped ahead, and it was clear it would no longer be possible to meet him again. He goes really fast!
A hard day, emotionally intense: mission accomplished, but with that bitter aftertaste of not being able to share the ending with the person I had prepared it for.
On the Camino you can organize everything in detail, but then the road decides: plans change, people slow down or speed up, and you have to accept it without losing the sense of the route.
Final arrival in Ciruena, with accommodation at Hostel Virgen de Guadalupe. There I met Francesco and Juean again, whom I had already met during the Camino. Francesco was a Sardinian guy, living in London and working as a chef. He was extremely funny, one of those people who bring lightness as soon as they show up. And his Camino story had something bizarre about it, perfectly in line with his character: he had gone to Lourdes for his own reasons, with no plan at all to start walking the Camino. Only after bathing in the water did he decide, right there and then, to set off for real. He bought a backpack and everything else directly in France and started walking. When I found that out, I thought I had found someone even more reckless than me. There were also three other people with them, but I would not hear from them again for the rest of the Camino. We had a beer together and I, hungry like a tiger, also ate something right away.
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