Firstly, thank you to everyone who’s following my posts, and for those that are leaving messages or sending emails. I’m sorry that I can’t get back to you all straight away. My time each day is very short.

Let me run you through a typical daily schedule:

I wake usually at 5:30am, and it takes me about an hour to pack up everything, and get out the door. I sleep in the clothes that I’ll wear that day. Lately it’s taken a little while each morning to deal with my medical issues – reapplying Bentadine and antibiotic cream onto my heel blister, then applying surgical dressings and crepe bandage.

I spray my shin with ice-pack spray. And put Voltaren and a support bandage on my knee. All this in the dark takes a while. I say in the dark because when you’re in an alburgue, and you want to get going before 7:30, you have to make allowances for those that want to keep sleeping.

The albergues usually require the pilgrims out though by no later than 8am.

I then start walking, and will stop at the first cafe to get 3 Cafe Contardos, which are like piccolo lattes. If there’s no cafe open, then I just walk. I usually like to put in between 2-3 hrs walk before I take my first stop. Depending on how my pain threshold is, that’s somewhere around 8-10kms.

I stop a lot and take photos though, because the light at that time of the day is wonderful. After the break at about 10:30am, I then walk through to 1pm. I’ve made it mandatory that I stop at 1pm, no matter where I am, and have some lunch.

Usually that lunch constitutes a pear, maybe some cheese, an orange sometimes, sometimes some bread. If I’m feeling depleted of energy before lunch while I’m walking, I’ll have a muesli bar.

If there’s a town nearby, I’ll sometime stop and have a sit down meal – a pilgrims lunch. I’ll do a separate post on the pilgrims meals, but basically I usually have lentil soup, grilled chicken, and some ice cream. Walking these kms means you don’t have to worry about calories!

What I do after lunch depends on how I feel. I usually like to put in a few more hours, and walk through till about 3pm or 3:30pm. Then I find a place to stay, I have a shower, I do my laundry, hang it out to dry, download my photos that I’ve taken during the day, and then start my blog.

By then it’s dinner time, and then sleep. I’m usually out to it by 9:30pm latest, then up again at about 5:30am the next day. At home I don’t usually sleep 8hrs – normally it’s about 5-6hrs; but when you’re walking between 24-30 kms each day with a backpack, sometimes over mountains, it makes you tired!

Today was another wonderful day of walking. I’d made a mistake yesterday – the Meseta started today. Yesterday’s country was a precursor.

I bumped into Ivan the Terrible and his wife Giovanna today. They’re the lovely Italian couple who’d guided me beautifully into Burgos. As we approached a huge hill that would take us up onto the plateau that was the Meseta proper, Ivan the Terrible told me something an Italian priest had said about the Camino.

The priest had said that the Camino is like your soul journey. The first third is full of mountains and valleys, full of highs and lows, deep emotions. That’s your life.

In the second stage, you ascend to the Meseta, where it’s calm, quiet, transcendent. That’s death.

And the third stage, after the Meseta and from Leon on heading to Santiago, that’s your rebirth.

I looked at Ivan the Terrible in horror, then I looked at the track leading up to the start of the Meseta. Bloody hell mate, i said, does that mean I’m climbing up to my death?

He smiled and shrugged, as Italians do, and I stepped aside and let him go first.

(28kms today to Boadilla del Camino. Got the last bed in one of the most perfect albergues on the Camino. When I walked in, at about 5:30pm after walking for nearly 10 hrs today, about a dozen pilgrims clapped me. I felt very embarrassed. They know I’m in pain, and going slowly. They were very sweet. A shorter day tomorrow.)