[Gocamino] Home again

[Robert Spenger]

Back home with mixed feelings. A month is a long time to be away from family, friends, and familiar surroundings. It is a relief to be using my iMac desktop to write this instead of struggling with the touch screen of the iPad mini toy that I carried on the trip. I feel like I am using a “real” computer again and not a toy. I put quotes around the real, since this level of computer is well down on the list, below the supercomputers, main frames, and towers. It is still far above trying to work with a touch screen.
 
I thought that I was used the weather at home, but it is hotter than normal for early June here and I have a long way to go to get reacclimatized. When I landed at LAX, it did not show. I arrived in the early evening on Tuesday and left fairly early on Wednesday. The cool marine layer of the early summer on the coast was in full force and the wind made it outright chilly. Reality hit when I got off the Antelope Express van in Palmdale at noon and was enveloped by the high desert oven blast.
 
In Spain I had been averaging slightly under 5 miles a day, at slightly less than 2.5 mph, and carrying less than 10 pounds in my day pack. The temperatures were in the range 40 –60 F. It was most certainly a lot easier than doing yard work in the Owens Valley with 3 digit Fahrenheit readings.
 
The trip did what I intended, in that it gave me some insight to my current capabilities. I feel assured that I can still do a regular camino walk, doing more reasonable daily distances (10-12 mph for me) and carrying a full load (~20 pounds). Getting to Europe and back is another matter. The pain of sitting in a cattle car seat for 8-9 hours is excruciating. I am not sure that I could handle it again.
 
A more serious matter is, “Am I losing it?” I am afraid that the answer to that is. “No. You have the wrong verb tense. You have already lost it!” I had put in a lot of work planning the trip and making the travel and accommodation arrangements over the net, including motel nights in LA and the express rides between the Antelope Valley and LAX. I didn’t have to do the accommodations and land travel Spain. That was done by the group organizer. If I had been on my own, it would have been harder to arrange the lodging along the way. With all that planning, I somehow managed to make one major screw-up that cost me dearly. My papers clearly showed that I was due to make the SdeC to Madrid to Boston to LAX on Monday the 3rd of June. Somehow my mind slipped a cog along the way and I showed up that the SdeC airport on Tuesday the 4th of June only to be told that I missed my plane the day before. It did get all squared away – at a significant cost – with one change – Chicago instead of Boston – and I was back on track one day off. Thanks to the Antelope Express staff, my wife was alerted to the fact that I was not there to be picked up on Tuesday morning. She had the foresight to ask them to hold a reservation for me for Wednesday and also to rebook my motel room for Tuesday night. Good thing that she did. The clerk at the motel told me that they filled up in between the time that she made the reservation and the time I showed up. It was costly however. I had to pay the full price for the missed night. They did give me a 10% break for the night I was there, but it was still a higher price than it was a month earlier when I stayed there at the start of the trip. It was a different story at the express office. Not only did they not charge me for missing the Tuesday pickup, they did not even charge me the $2 for the extra day that my truck was parked in their lot.
 
Regards to all,
 
Bob Spenger
 
Sent from my 24” iMac, not an 8” toy.