No greater love has a pilgrim...

...than to drain and bandage another pilgrims blisters!!

In the last few days we´ve seen some pretty serious blisters, but in the same place there is always a fellow pilgrm who comes to the rescue with a needle and thread and some compeed! It´s a pretty amazing spectacle of human kindness, and very much in the spirit of the camio.

We´ve really been enjoying the company of other pilgrims this week - today we walked up a big hill (the guide book said this week was flat!!!) and when we got to the top there was a big board on which people had written little messages to each other, and we were about to leave when Mary spotted one which said "Helen and Marie" on it, and it wasn´t a coincidence - a father and daughter from America who we had been walking with a few days before has left us a note congratulating us on getting to the top and hoping they´d see us in a few days! It was really cool to get it, and hopefully we´ll catch up with them in Leon! We´ve also been walking with a Canadian couple who have been furnishing us with hilarious stories of their camino so far - Debbie´s limited Spanish resulted in her being served a coke and calamaris when she thought she had ordered lemonade!!

Thankfully we´ve been getting by a little better with the Spainish, although yesterday in the pharmacy I struggled to explain tendenitis in Spainish, and after 10 minutes of playing a sort of comedy charades, the pharmacist went into the back and came out with a massive dictionary and plonked it on the desk!! (We got there in the end!!)

Today´s albergue is amazing - there´s a huge  garden and even a swimming pool!!! Sadly we sent our swimming stuff home thinking we wouldn´t need them, but we´ve spent a really nice afternoon in the garden! I´ve been sitting with my right side to the sun in an attempt to even out the tan which is in danger of becoming the weirdest tan ever - we both have sock lines, and lines on our shoulders from the rucksack, I have a white patch on my left knee where a bandage has been, and to top it all off the sun is always on the left because we´re always walking East, so my left side is browner than the right!!!! We might have to walk home again to even it out!! Disclaimer: when I say brown I mean slightly less pale than when we started.

Lots of love from sunny Spain next to the pool at our albergue!
Helen and Mary
:D