Day 8: Hurric8 | Murray Morrison

The past two mornings have been tough. It’s been difficult to find the motivation to leave our comfortable and warm albergue beds. The only thing that has been getting us fired up to attack the Camino has been the distant sound of Memphis. We hear those yells. Yeah, the ones that go like, “Memphis Pilgrims! Memphis Pilgrims!” Then we remember. We remember why we decided to do this thing: the city of Memphis. It’s in our name. It’s in our DNA. But we forget it sometimes and thank you for that constant reminder.

With all joking aside, today was truly a difficult day. If our long trek was not enough, the hurric8 (pun on hurricane and day 8, don’t think it’s obvious) that hit us at kilometer marker 9 made sure it was. We trudged up a hill where the trail we were following turned into a river. This made it difficult to use, so we put our boots in four-wheel drive and went off road a little. When we finally made it to the town of Najera, we felt like how I imagine Joseph and Mary did, as they navigated the small town of Bethlehem without much success. We ended up changing out of our coldly drenched socks and into some somewhat dry ones outside a locked store under some cover. We were lucky enough after this to have no more rain, which made the rest of the hike enjoyable.

We ended up making it 37 kilometers to Santo Domingo which is by far our longest hike of the trip. We got in around 5, and God must be watching over us because we expected the room in the large albergue that we were staying in to be very packed and that we would most likely have to both take top bunks, but the albergue head put us in an empty room. We are very thankful and excited for a nice night’s sleep. We had a great pilgrim meal at a nearby restaurant, and afterwards I saw a pizza and sandwich vending machine, so I obviously had to try one of them. Got a pizza. It tasted about how you would expect it to.
We are headed to bed now. May need some yells in the morning especially after today, so be ready, Memphis.

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