Lest you think that walking the Camino is all a bed of roses… today was a day when that Tomfoolery is put to rest. Today was hard. Really hard.

It started with me oversleeping. I woke up with a start to see that Gary was completely dressed and packed and ready to go. The pet Camino girl was gone, her blankets folded neatly on her bed. I hadn’t even heard her leave.

“Why didn’t you wake me up?” I asked, feeling slightly embarrassed. I didn’t wait for an answer. I jumped out of bed and began cramming things in my pack as fast as I could.

We’d promised Kristen (who was staying at a different albergue) that we’d meet her at 7:00 for breakfast. I sent her a text, hoping she hadn’t left her albergue yet. Thanks to me, we were clearly going to be late. We made it to the café around 7:15, later than we’d planned but still in time for the requisite café con leche, orange juice and a napolitano. (the Spanish version of chocolate croissant).

We set off in the fog. A humid, sticky fog that attracted flies. Lots of flies. They swarmed around our heads, in our ears and around our eyes, landing on our sweaty skin as we waved our hands at them aimlessly. The path climbed most of the day. Up and slight down. More up. Less down. Flies. More flies and still more flies. That’s the way it went for many of those 27 kilometers. I had to keep talking myself into taking another step, a sad attempt at motivational encouragement and to ignore my throbbing feet.

Gary was singing. I was counting. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10… 1, 2, 3, … and on and on.

After a while we came across a strange little cafe - A Tasca Café do Acébo. It was a small hovel of a place with every square inch covered in paraphernalia from days gone by. Photographs of pilgrims. Hollywood stars. Old watches. Movie Posters. Watches hung across the bar. The bartender was drinking beer. Sipping between service of these weary pilgrims. It was the kind of place that in real life I would have been too afraid to enter, but this was the Camino and we were tired. We needed a place to sit down. Café con leche to nourish our will to continue. We walked in without a second thought.

So we were plugging along. Swatting flies. Counting. Singing. We were doing it. One step at a time. And then when we were almost done… and I mean ALMOST to A Fonsagrada, the road began to climb. And climb. And climb.

No switch backs. No gradual up and down. No sections of flat where you could catch your back. Straight up. Steep. The kind of steep that gets your heart pumping. Son of a bitch.

“I bet this stretch has heard some profound swearing,” Kristen said as we stood there panting and catching our breath so we could begin again. She was, of course, right. The next night, as I lay in bed at 8:00 p.m., completely wiped out from exhaustion, I mentioned her comment to the Czechs who were sleeping across from me. Oh yeah, they said. We were using every swear word we could think of - in Czech of course.

At the top of the hill I sat on the guardrail, waiting for Gary to reach the top. “Are you fucking kidding me?” I said when he came over the crest. I’d been afraid to let on how much I was struggling. I mean, we’d been on the Camino for a week already.

“That sucked.” he said.

It had, indeed, sucked.

Dinner that night was sopa a la Gallega, a hearty potato and bean soup with garlic and onions and kale, pulpo, cooked in spanish paprika and served on sauteed potatoes and a plate of pimientos de padrón, seared padrón peppers sprinkled with coarse salt. There was enough to feed a small army. We stuffed ourselves and once again, were in bed before the sun went down.