The Camino One Year Later

Crossing the Bridge at the bottom of Rue de la Citadele

One year ago today we started walking out of St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port, naive pilgrims without an idea of what was ahead of us. That seems like a lifetime ago. On the occasion of most anniversaries, I reflect on how quickly time has passed by. It seems only yesterday that we did this or that. It was only a year or so ago that we graduated, met friends, lost touch, moved in, moved out, traveled to this place or that; all things that happened years or decades ago.

This year has been different, though. I sometimes try to reflect on all that we did this year, only to have the details lost in the fog of time and memory. It takes looking back at pictures to remember all of the people we met, places we saw, and all the things we did. The pictures bring back only good memories, where it takes reading our old blog post to remember the physical and mental pain we suffered on the Camino. This is what makes the most everlasting memories though: remembering how much we needed the other people around us to keep on.

It seems years have passed by since we walked the Camino. It's hard to imagine that after we walked the Way, we also traveled all over the US, Carribean, and Central America. Our time after the Camino affected me nearly as much as the time on the Camino. We hiked the most amazing, awe-inspiring, and breathtaking trails in the National Parks, and rekindled a love of camping and the American outdoors. The National Parks we visited instilled in me an awe of nature and a pride in America that I haven't felt in years. We snorkeled among beautiful underwater gardens of coral that I didn't imagine possible. The time out living at Kahola gave me a new outlook on conservation and being less wasteful with water and energy. Living in Colorado, and seeing no other soul besides Lauren for weeks at a time gave me a much deeper understanding of our marriage and made me love her that much more.

On reflecting on the past year, I think that I can come up with three things that I've learned: we all need each other for happiness and survival, the Earth is a more beautiful and amazing place than words are capable of describing yet all too easy to defile, and we don't need extraneous material goods in our lives to be happy. What follows from this is that we should spend more time with our friends and families, spend more time outdoors, be more conservation minded, and live simpler with less things. Material goods only serve to bind you to an unhappy life of keeping up with the Jones's; working long hours to afford things that won't make you happy and serve only to fill up our landfills. Whereas, camping, hiking, and generally being in nature will make you happier, lead to lower stress, and give you a sense of how important it is to protect our natural environment. What's even better, is to enjoy these things with friends and family alongside.

A happy Camino family just after receiving our Compostela's at the end of the journey in Santiago, Spain.

Kahola Preppers

Well, I survived my first week back to work. I don't know that my survival was ever in doubt, but some may have questioned my ability to actually do something productive for 8 hours a day. After five years of engineering prior to the sabbatical, much like the proverbial bike, it was a bit wobbly for the first couple days, but then it was back to business as usual. It helps that I'm picking up on all the same projects that I left off on 7 months ago. And I'll probably still be working on them 7 months from now. Yes, things go slowly in the development world. Now we've only yet to see if Lauren will survive her first week. Something tells me she will.

Regardless of our inevitable return to working life, the sabbatical seems only half over. We went straight back out to the cabin this last weekend after work on Friday. It felt as if we just needed to get some business done in town over the week and were getting back to our real lives for the weekend. The only difference at the cabin this time is that I didn't have any projects to work on, so we actually just relaxed the whole weekend. The water filter was flowing, the stone pathway was built, solar shower running, and all of the other little things were taken care of.

My biggest goal was realized out there in the form of a self-sustaining drinking water supply from a system that I built myself. The biosand filter worked wonders on the lake water. Only rarely could you smell even a hint of fishiness, and you could never taste anything off. I had to start using the lake water because the small spring on our property dried up on us after a month without rain. However, I came to like the lake water more (considering how much improved it was through the filter) because the spring water was extremely hard water, which is something no water filter can change. It sometimes tasted like I was hanging drywall--liquid chalk. I don't think I could build a reverse-osmosis filter myself for under $50...

I combined the biosand filter with solar disinfection, and for the last three weeks of being out there, that is all the water we needed for drinking, cooking, dishes, and showering. For the two of us, that equated to about 10 gallons of water a day, or about 300 gallons a month. If we were doing more laundry out there, I imagine that might have doubled that number to 600 gallons a month. Considering the average American household consumes more than 10,000 gallons a month, I would say that we're doing pretty good. You start to really understand how much water you use when you have to manually filter all of your water yourself, and carry it around your property instead of having it piped. However, except for the manpower involved in carrying water around, there wasn't any external power source needed for the purification process. Our Prepper street cred must have surely ticked up a couple notches. Now we just need to get our booby traps installed...

4 Days and Nights of the 4th of July

Happy 4th of July! We had an awesome four night long celebration with all the coolest people in the world (at least those within reasonable driving distance who didn't already have other commitments and who also don't mind using an out-house for a toilet). It was an epic four days of grilling, swimming, sailing, drinking, and fireworks. It was a bit taxing though, and I can say with certainty that I'm glad its all over. We're most definitely getting too old for this stuff.

The other part about having awesome friends over for a four day long party is that when they leave, instead of leaving you with a huge mess, they leave you with a awesome new limestone pathway. I literally could not have done it without them, considering some of those stones weigh 200+ lbs. The limestone blocks came from the same quarry up the hill where the stones for the cabin were quarried. How awesome is that?

He's swedish-american, get it?

Some Pictures

Just thought I would upload some of my fluffy pretty pictures...

 

Last night. 

This morning.

And the most beautiful view, saved for last!

Home on the Range - Now In Color!

Just a quick follow up to that last post--shiny color pictures of some of the projects going on out there.

Old sickle, new edge. 

Mowing the lawn...pioneer style. Except for the hair, I guess.

Our water purification operation. The bucket in the front catches the spring water coming from a buried pipe, and the orange buckets in the back are the biosand filter, found here in its native habitat. In this picture I'm filling the solar water heater with filtered water. Sure beats showering in dirty lake water!  

Bucket getting the spring water. 

Hi-tech water heater. Works surprisingly well based on the low expectations set by its appearance. 

Solar shower. 

Yep, that's a rubbermaid cooler with a valve installed on it. That hose leads down to the shower head. If I fill the cooler the night before with ~115 deg F water, it will be around ~90 deg F in the morning. We usually shower at night anyway though because getting into bed after sweating for 15 hours isn't very pleasant. 

Home on the Range

Hi there, Internet! It's been a while. While we haven't been totally away from the Internet lately, every time we have been around it, its been because we actually had some sort of important business to do. When you only get internet a couple of hours a week, you find that you end up paying bills and deleting emails the whole time rather than writing blog posts. But hark! we have made time to do some writing. Unfortunately, we don't have the cables to upload our pictures as of yet, but hopefully we will be able to coordinate that at some point soon too.

Living at the cabin has been an trip. While we do have an air conditioner (set at a cool 80 deg F anyways), which makes sleeping tolerable out there, we spend the majority of our time outside anyway. Cooking, eating, using the outhouse...even in the middle of the night during a thunderstorm, purifying our water, showering, and just generally relaxing is all done outside. And we've been broiling in the heat some of our days out there. It's so different from our recent stint in the desert because of the humidity. Even some days sitting still in the shade with a breeze, I'm still overheating. But we've got a lake there, so it's pretty easy to cool off. At least its easy to stay hydrated compared to the desert.

I spent about a week setting up all of my projects, and everything is running smoothly. Solar hot water heater is heating, the shower is showering, and the sand is filtering. On a good sunny day, the water heater gets the water up to about 110-115 deg F, so it's not super efficient, but good enough for a hot shower before bed. It also stays hot enough over night to have a greater-than-luke-warm-but-not-quite-hot shower in the morning. And with the low flow showerhead drilled out to work with my low pressure system, we get a decent flow for about 6 minutes of shower.

My sand filter is up and running as well. It filters the water so that it looks crystal clear and clean, but we're not drinking directly out of it yet. The filter reaches it's peak efficiency in purification only after 30-45 days of continuous use, and we're only about 3 weeks into the cycle. So we're using the water in cooking where it's going to be boiled and for dishes, but we are yet to drink it straight. Combined with solar disinfection though, we're solid on the drinking water and haven't even gotten sick yet! Honestly, the spring water would more than likely not make us sick to drink it straight, but I'd rather be extra safe than sit in the outhouse all day.

So now that we've spent all this time doing projects, cleaning, raking, weeding, and cutting the lawn (with a sickle, yes a sickle), we've finally got some time to just relax out there, without any TV, Internet, or phone calls to disturb us.

Hot Hike

We did our longest warm up hike to date on Saturday at the lake and man was it brutal. The distance wasn't bad, about 7 miles total and we were both feeling pretty solid about that. I'm sure we could have done 10 easily without being sore. But it was absolutely sweltering outside. I saw as high as 108 degrees on the thermometer around 4pm. Who knows what the heat index was. Temperature 108 F, feels like "a furnace." Even though we started early, it wasn't early enough. The temperature was around 103 degrees by the time we finished a little after noon. And of course, being the Flint Hills, there is no shade. I think there are 4 cottonwood trees and a lone willow tree along the gravel south of the lake that we were able to rest under.

We took a full gallon of water for the two of us and had drank half of it by the time we hit 3 miles. We decided to go a little further so we could round the hike out to 7 miles and even that was almost too much. Lauren was feeling a little light headed and dizzy by the time we got back and I was getting close as well. I think we must have drank almost another gallon once we got back. Its pretty amazing to think I could sweat out more than a gallon of water in 2 hours, but if you saw me out there...you wouldn't have doubted it.

But at the very least, my boots are feeling awesome and well broken in with about 25 miles on them, and I'm getting my new backpack settled in. I'll let you know how they feel in another couple hundred miles!

More pictures after the jump.

Chiggers In The Night

Rocking The Headlamp

We took our first night hike a few weekends ago at Kahola Lake.  Despite the long socks and bug spray I still managed to get some chiggers.  We don't anticipate much night hiking while in Spain, though we may start some days before sunrise.