durezas

I´m quite excited to go to Finisterre, another 90K from Santiago, where I´ll complete my walking journey and will then get into a motor vehicle for the first time in 6 weeks. (Another pilgrim encouraged me to take a bus to another part of Santiago the other day, and I jumped back as though he had touched me with a hot poker.)

Although I want to keep walking, my body is not quite as excited. My body doesn´t want to cooperate anymore. Throughout the Camino, I have watched people hobble through pain and discomfort to carry on. I have made appropriately sympathetic faces and have listened to their woes. Even though my hip hurt some and I had few blisters, they were never really painful enough to make me suffer significantly.

I fear that those days might be over. They gave me the Compostela, and I think I may have graduated. I think I may be a real pilgrim now.

This is my third day in a row of not walking, the longest break that I´ve had since May 16, and I feel achier and limpier than I have for the entire time I´ve been in Europe. I´ve consulted a lot of other pilgrims about this mysterious pressure on the bottom of my foot, but they don´t seem to be able to relate. It feels a bit like I´m walking on top of a large, soft marble all of the time. Eventually, I found a pilgrim who got that special glint in her eye when I told her. She knew. She had been there. Jackpot!

As we sat in a sidewalk cafe, she insisted that I take off my shoe and show her. She put down her drink, held my foot and started palpating it and clucking her tongue. Yup, yup. She wrote down a prescription and told me to come back to her for help with how to treat my problem properly.

It took a clumsy conversation at the pharmacy and some frustrating searching on Google in Spanish to determine the name of what I have. A dureza. A corn.

I´ll slap on a plaster soon (actually, Penny will), and I´ll set out for Finisterre tomorrow. I´ll hobble if I have to. I´ll hobble for 36 miles, but I´m definitely going to get there. My initial plan was a hard 3 days, but I´m breaking it into a slower 4 days. I´ve seen all of the people I need to see, and I can´t sit still in this city anymore.