Camino bore. The last day.

Oh DEARRRRR! All good things come to an end, and we had to leave Santiago on the Monday night at 10pm, having arrived on the Saturday morning. Another day with the botafumeiro, our fourth experience of it. We were very lucky - some have been to Santiago and not seen it in action at all. Our luck was down to it being a Holy Year, with increased numbers of pilgrims, and being there on a Sunday helped too - two swingings that day. Perhaps it seems childish to take pleasure in such a thing, but it IS a spectacle, and I never tire of it, watching repeats on the laptop ad infinitum.

So on Monday we mopped up all the things we wanted to do, shopping for a pressie for our new deacon, a few souvenirs, some Liquor de Herbas, books of pictures, CDs, the obligatory T shirts (been there) (mine reads "You'll never walk alone" - so true!) We didn't have a lot of carrying capacity, being rather laden with our rucksacks and preparing to travel by train and probably not a lot of luggage space. And we had some good eating that day.

And a year on? Nothing is predictable about the camino. I feel to be in a kind of shock that it came to an end, even now. Perhaps tomorrow I'll come to terms with it. I didn't think it would be like this. I think we all hope that by doing it we'll find the things we do back at home will be easier, we'll be purged of all the things that make us less efficient, we'll be streamlined human beings..... I think of all the people we met, with problems to solve, decisions to make, past lives to move on from.  I'll have to post the pic of the station and go to bed, because I can't seem to bear the loss. It seems harder now than it did in real life, so to speak. But tomorrow is another day, and who can tell what work the camino will do? Tomorrow, I'm on my own from here: like the stork that has to jump off the nest, the feeling is that one is about to jump off the camino. I hope I learn to fly.