Sept 4: a confession

So, I have a confession to make.  The past 2 days, my blisters were so bad, that we took a bus from Los Arcos to Logrono, and then from Logrono to Enjera.  The blister on my right little toe ripped totally off, exposing over half of my toe to brand new (and very sensitive) skin.  And the blister that was on the pad of my left foot had turned into a blood blister, so when I was draining it, a pinkish fluid came out.  I was hobbling around so badly from Estella to Los Arcos, that I started to develop achilles problems.  So, Linda graciously agreed to ride the bus until my foot got better.  And after spending $50 at the pharmacy and applying all sorts of ointments and skin protectors, my feet are finally better.  But the thing I think that helped them the most was plain old soaking them in salt water.  One of our friends from Ireland suggested that and it really did the trick.  So I have bought an espom salt like product (which includes some perfume too, which quite frankly is needed as well right now) and I am now soaking my feet twice a day.  The blisters are still there, but they've hardened up, and I'm getting better about stopping and taking my shoes off when things start to get too hot.  I'm also going to take Steve Shundich's advice and change my socks halfway through the hike each day, since the heat generated in the shoes are one of the key causes for the blisters.

So the good news is today we walked from Enjera to Santa Domingo, and to be honest, I was very excited to be out on the Camino again.  It was tough to ride the bus, because the road often goes close enough to the Camino that you can see other pilgrims making there way along the path, while we were riding in the comfort of a bus.  And we were also missing out on all of the local sites.  The other thing we did today was we started much earlier, which worked out great.  We left our hotel around 7am, when it was still a bit dark out, and had some breakfast on the way, but we were out of the town by 7:45am, and it was wonderful to be walking that time of day.  The sun hadn't come up yet, so it was still cool out and there was a nice breeze throught the morning.  We reached our destination by 1pm, so we missed all of the real hot conditions from 3-5pm (which had been our unfortunate modus operendi up until now).  We even had time to take a siesta and shower up before checking out the town of Santa Domingo.

I've attached some pictures from our walk today.  The first is of Linda standing next to these huge haystacks that they create in the fields (just like in the movie The Way).  They stack hay bales into huge rectangles that are 30-40 feet high, 40-50 feet wide and 70-80 feet deep.  They must just leave them in the fields until they come to pick up what they need.  The second picture is of a man touching up a statue of the Virgin Mary at a small church that we found when we stopped for lunch in Cireuna.  The church could probably only hold 100 people maximum, but it seemed kind of charming, and when we went inside, we found these men working on the statue and thought it would make for an interesting photo.  And the final picture is just a vista of what we see most of the time as we are hiking through the fields (which currently is usually around 80% of the time, and my understanding is it will continue that way until we get to the region of Galacia, where Santiago is).