Day 38 - Fillobal to Sarria - 22km

Well, are you sitting down to read this? It wasn’t an exciting day but lots of interesting things happened so I may have a bit of a run on the mouth (or fingers in this case).

First off, I had a wonderful private room last night but I had a terrible sleep. I finally faced the facts yesterday that I have bed bug bites. I had washed everything I own and put in the dryer. I figured it was solved, but I woke up about 1am and had a couple more bites. I am not sure if these were already there and just started itching or if they were new. I was so paranoid about it that I couldn’t really sleep. Every time I thought I felt something, I quickly turned on the lights and nothing was there. At about 4am I finally said, “this is enough, I need sleep, don’t think about it and just sleep.” So I got a good couple hours of sleep.

I was awake and ready to go by 7:30 so I decided to go. It is still dark until 8am these days so I needed to wear my headlamp. Off I went, about 20 minutes or so into the hike (it was downhill on a path), I could hear someone hiking behind me and see a headlamp. That is no big deal, always happens, but when I looked forward, I saw someone coming towards me (up the hill) that wasn’t wearing a headlamp. I started to wonder why they didn’t have a headlamp and why are they walking backwards on the trail. It took me at least 5 seconds (and count that, it is pretty long), to realize that the figure coming towards me was just me. It was my shadow created by the headlamp on the person behind me. Too funny!

The hike today was new to me. The last time I was here, the standard trail was through a town called Samos. Now, that part of the trail is an option, and going straight through is the regular trail. The regular one is 6km shorter so you know which one I chose.

It was shorter, but it was a bit of a challenge. After about 3kms of going down, it was time to go up again. It was a pretty big hill and then there were steep parts going down again. Jenna and I laughed the night before because when you see the elevation profile, it almost looks like the “middle finger”. When I got to the top, I sent Jenna a text saying we definitely named it correctly!

Today was only 22km (funny I can say only 22km now), but I was feeling extra tired. I am sure it was lack of sleep that contributed to my lack of energy. I made lots of stops to replenish the energy.

I arrived around 3:30pm, so in the late hot sun again. When I was checking in, Yannette saw me and said a group of them are getting together for dinner at 6 so I joined them. It was fun chatting about nonsense stuff and laughing (I am keeping this PG so I won’t give details). At one point someone asked if we thought we lost weight. Most of us said yes. I can feel it in my shorts and can see it on my face. Then someone had an idea to find a picture from when we started. So I dug back, and boy can I see a difference. That felt good.

Ok, I am going to head to bed now. Keep our fingers crossed that I don’t see any new bites in the morning or I will definitely need to take more aggressive tactics to rid my stuff of them. The good thing is everything is contained in one bag. The other good thing is that I looked around the table tonight and saw lots of bites, so it ain’t just me.

TTYL (Video coming tomorrow, sleep 💤 more important today)

Throwback to 2009 from Julie’s Journal

The hike today was beautiful. Lots of trees and mountains and very cool old villages. We took our time and walked at a steady pace. I think we finally arrived at the Albergue at 5:30pm. Along the way, Joerg and I kept joking about his “girlfriend”.

Last night, there was a German lady with a German man that we kept running into. They stopped at our albergue. At one point, Joerg told her that I only spoke English. She didn’t say anything, then he started to say it in German but she cut him off saying she understood. She then still continued to speak in German. At one point, she started rubbing Joerg’s leg for a good 30 seconds then she offered him a mint but did not offer me one. I didn’t think anything of it except that she was a little rude.

Later I asked what she was talking about when she was rubbing his leg and he said he can’t remember but it was nothing to do with his leg, she was just rubbing it. That was too funny. I don’t feel threatened at all, but we were joking about it all day. For example, there were notes on some posts and he said they were from her telling him to meet her after dark under Cassiopeia.Read more