All the People

We've been walking and eating with a lot more people lately. We always have the typical icebreaker conversations about the trail of the day, whether their feet & knees hurt, what country their from, and how much of the Camino they're walking (and usually in that order). But past that its always interesting to find out why they're on the Camino and how they are able to do it at all.

Lots of people only seem to do the Camino in stages, like Tom from England who is also a civil engineer and who could only get 3 weeks off work this year to do half this year and half next year. Then there's the disaffected European college student who all seem to just travel around after they graduate until they run out of money. We met a girl named Martina from the Netherlands and a German guy Marius both doing this. Theres lots of retirees as well, like the retired 76 year old surgeon who performed some minor blister surgery on Lauren and Martina last night in the albergue with me as his scrub nurse. He's the oldest we've met, but we've heard some rumors of an 82 year old on the trail also.

Of course there's also a bunch of people in their own circumstances. We just met a Danish basket artist today who just sets her own hours. And there's the stay at home mom with her 16 year old home-schooled son who are meeting her husband in Leon. There are also a few other people that we've met that I couldn't tell you much about. We've been in the same albergue for the last 4 nights, Takaguchi, who speaks almost no English, but at least we figured out each others names. We still haven't met anyone else who quit their job to come though.