Day 28: Them Hippos Up to Something | Murray Morrison

Chomp, chomp. We were the hungry hippos today. We continuously took small bites at our long road meter by meter. We have had a joke along the Camino that Santiago has a lot of friends that protect him from your Memphis Pilgrims. The meters have done a good job defending Santiago. We aren’t gonna lie. It’s been a tough and testing month, but Santiago seems to be running short on friends now with only 20,000 “friends” left.

Last night as Alex and I were preparing to lay down to sleep, we see our French friend in our same albergue. He always brightens our day because when we see him on the walk, he always yells in excitement and exclaims something in French. We started yelling back eventually and giving him thumbs up. This time though when he sees us he doesn’t yell, but instead, he walks over and gives each of us one of his cookies. It sealed our friendship. We may never see this man again, and we don’t even speak the same language, but he is our friend for a lifetime.

Today’s walk was very interesting. Many new people on the road today. There seemed to be a buzz in the air as we creeped closer and closer to Santiago. We met a really nice young man from Georgia (pictured below). Alex and he had some mutual friends from Savannah. He is a practicing priest in the Catholic church. Needless to say we were impressed, as he didn’t seem many, if any, days over 30. We made sure to keep our distance, so our seasoned pilgrim odor didn’t scare him away.  We like to think it’s the smell of success.  It was very pleasant day without any clouds in the sky, and the forest provided plenty of shade. In the middle of our walk, we were run off the road by a stampede of cows. About 15-20 cows come running (they run at about the speed of a human walking) down the path. We were sincerely confused by the seemingly unattended cows but then saw the small shepherd trailing behind. As I said last time, Camino gonna Camino.

The Camino has an unwritten rule book about how to carry yourself on the Way. I’m sure Alex and I broke many rules (and still probably do) at the outset of the trip, but you can definitely tell the people who just started from the ones who have been walking for weeks. We are probably somewhere in the middle when it comes to behavior.
We are exhausted, as we got in around 4 today after 33 km, which is longer than we have been used to recently. Just glad us hippos woke up with an appetite.

Alex conveniently chewing pastry-

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