Because we stayed out dancing until 3:45am, it was hard to wake up at eight, and it was even harder to wake Antwon. We finally went into his room after knocking every five minutes for half an hour. We had to go. If you get started too late, you have to walk through the hottest time of the day which is pretty rough when walking along a highway with a 25-pound bag. You also risk not getting a bed because most Albergues only have 16 spots do pilgrims. We finally told Antwon to catch up with us.
On the way, I took a pee break as Aria waged forward on the road. As I was catching up with my sister, I walked by a yard where four older men coughed and sputtered with laughter. They had one tooth collectively as they held their bellies and rolled around on the ground. I thought they were having a dandy time and their state of bliss made me laugh along with them. I smiled and waved at them until I looked ahead and saw Aria’s mortified face. She told me they had all been standing on each other’s shoulders to get a glimpse of her ass over the fence. When she turned around and caught them, they all fell over with laughter.
The sun was blistering hot and Robert was right about all the highway walking we’d have to endure. The path was by no means ugly, but it wasn’t beautiful like it had been over the last few days. My farmer-tan is definitely coming in great, along with my shorts tan, tank-top-tan, boots/socks tan and Chacos tan. I’m going to look like a multi-colored cheetah by the time this trip is over. We were hot, hungover and over-tired so we agreed on staying in a little town called Boo de Peglias.
We went for lunch at the only restaurant in the small village. We ordered huge salads for some nutrition and fiber, considering we’d practically only been fed bread thus far. The meal was far more expensive than we had expected as the handwriting on the menu made 4s look like 1s and 9s look like 7s. We checked into the small albergue and headed straight to our room to catch up on the sleep we had missed the night before. The hostel was incredibly clean and smelled like baby powder. It was the first time I willingly touched the sheets provided on a hostel bed.
As we were going to sleep, Antwon confided in us that he was in the process of writing a love letter. It was to a girl back home that he’d been really good friends with over the last two years, but had never confessed his feelings to her. After perfecting and correcting the letter over the last four nights, it was finally ready. He’s moving from France to Montreal in the next few months and decided the time to send the letter was now or never. Aria and I were both mesmerized by his cute little romance story. Oh, young love.
When we awoke, we purchased the dinner that was provided for pilgrims. The dinner came with a huge salad, an entree, dessert and an entire bottle of wine for 10-euros. Everything was cooked and served by the family that ran the hostel. We sat with some older pilgrims that were staying at the hostel. They were all absolutely hammered off the red wine they were given. Drunkenly, one women had completely lost her English as she sat staring at us as we talked, a man giggled as he tripped down the hallway on his way to bed, and another woman actually ran into a closed door. Drunk people in general are hilarious, but drunk old people really take the cake.
We asked the hostel owner if we could do laundry and he offered to do it all for us while we slept. So far on our trip, laundry has never been free of charge, or done for us, so we happily obliged. We thought we had our perfect little room to ourselves but a noisy biker joined us at midnight. He sawed logs the entire night and kept the tree of us awake for the most part. I got up to use the bathroom in the morning and on my return to our room, realized how muggy it had become. It smelled like a hot-foot-forest, so I opened the window and door. The biker guy got all huffy with me, panted loudly, and closed the window and door because they were letting light in. This guy had kept us up all night with his snoring, so we didn’t feel bad about re-opening the windows as soon as he made it back into his bed. He wasn’t even hiking the Camino, so I don’t know why his panties were in such a bunch.
