Lessons of the Camino: The 296th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
Today we discuss the Camino de Santiago de Compostela—the history, the experience of hiking two routes, the physical and mental revelations that emerge. ***** Our sponsors: ARMRA: an ancient bioactive whole food that can strengthen your immune system. Go to http://www.tryarmra.com/DARKHORSE to get 15% off your first order. Caraway: Non-toxic & beautiful cookware. Save $150 on a cookware set over buying individual pieces, and get 10% off your order at http://Carawayhome.com/DH10 Crowd...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream.
We typically give a number to these live streams, consecutively speaking.
I couldn't tell you what that number is.
I know it's in the 290s somewhere.
It is, it is, it is.
Yeah.
296.
It's 296, making me, Dr. Brett Weinstein, and you, Dr. Heatherheim.
A note for those of you who are watching this, at the end of, no, I should say, at the crescendo of our recent adventure, I shaved off my beard for reasons unknown to any of us, and I'm in the process of regrowing it, so be advised that I do not look grizzled.
what i look is rugged now for those of you who are just reasons unknown to any of us or just to the rest of us who aren't you No, I'm pretty sure I don't know them either.
But I did come out of the bathroom shaven, and it was a surprise to me anyway.
It was a very surprising moment to all.
For those of you who are simply listening and not watching, please be aware that I am 6'2 and devilishly handsome.
Not to toot my own horn, but it isn't going to toot itself.
So with that said, I mean, I think there are actually plenty of self-tooting horns now.
It seems like a low-hanging fruit with respect to technology.
Self-tooting horns could be easily constructed.
And speaking of technology, if you are watching this on a mobile device, people are larger than they appear.
Just be aware of that.
All right.
Shall we pay the rent?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, let's do that.
So we've been gone for a while, and we're actually going to be due on a live stream today, and on Saturday, and next Wednesday.
And we are delighted that you are here with us today.
And also, Brett's got some Patreon calls this weekend.
And so there's all sorts of ways to catch up with us if you are wanting to do that.
And we have, as usual, three sponsors right at the top of the hour.
That is the pain in the run.
But you can be assured that if we are reading ads here at the top of the hour on Dark Horse, that means that the products or services on offer are truly, truly excellent in our estimation.
We have vetted carefully the sponsors that we accept.
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Just nodding.
Agreement.
As you know, I'm struggling with a cold that I seem to have picked up on the plane ride home.
Yes.
Plane rides will do that.
Yeah.
Damn them.
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Did you say you had given the teflinated cookware the side-eye?
I think so, yeah.
And did you do that?
No, no, seed oils is actually what I was saying.
Seed oils.
That was seed oils.
Did you debate between the side eye and stink eye?
Because I admit, on hearing that, I'm thinking I need to look deeper into the distinction between these two things.
You're not going to do so.
I actually, I will.
I'll probably give up easily.
But I don't think it should be too troublesome a task.
Side eye versus stink eye.
Especially in the era of AI, where I could get a perfectly satisfactory answer that may be completely made up for reasons that are only side eye, stink eye, and AI.
Yeah, all right.
I'm with you.
Now, Heather, our final sponsor this week is CrowdHealth.
CrowdHealth isn't health insurance.
It's better.
It's obviously vastly better.
Which is not that hard because insurance isn't that good, but CrowdHealth is good.
Yes.
It's nearly open enrollment, the season when health insurance companies hope that you will once again blindly sign up for overpriced premiums and confusing fine print.
We used to do that.
Used to do that is what that says.
But not anymore.
Not since finding CrowdHealth.
CrowdHealth is a community of people funding each other's medical bills directly.
No middlemen, no networks, and no nonsense.
After we left our salary jobs as college professors, we spent years buying health insurance in the open market.
It was confusing, irritating, and very expensive.
Yeah, I will say that open market is a strange term there.
I mean, I wrote that, but it didn't seem very open.
Yeah, we call that a euphemism.
Yeah.
As a family of four who had health insurance for emergencies only, we were paying more than $1,500 a month for a policy with a $17,000 annual deductible to a company that never answered their phones.
That's called a red flag.
And had a website that didn't work.
Literally, it was the best that was purchasable on the so-called open market.
And it was great if what you wanted to do was spend money and not get anything for it.
Tens of thousands of dollars paid out for no benefit whatsoever.
I, that is Heather, went looking for alternatives and found CrowdHealth.
We would have been better off investing in the lottery.
Yep.
Remind me to cover expected return in the future.
All right.
We have now had two sets of great experiences with CrowdHealth.
When Toby broke his foot in the summer of 2024 and when I, that is Heather, slipped wet concrete and split open my scalp this summer, we went to the ER and got good but expensive treatment from the medical staff there.
In both cases, CrowdHealth paid our bills with no hassle.
Their app was simple and straightforward to use and the real people who work at CrowdHealth were easy to reach, clear, and communicative.
Wow.
With CrowdHealth, you get health care for under $100 a month.
You get access to a team of health bill negotiators, low-cost prescriptions and lab testing tools, and a database of low-cost, high-quality doctors vetted by CrowdHealth.
With CrowdHealth, you pay for a little stuff out of pocket.
But for any event that costs more than $500, a diagnosis that requires ongoing treatment, a pregnancy, the same overpriced, over-complicated mess.
And what?
Yeah.
All right.
We're going to try that again.
It's possible I just excluded a phrase that was necessary there.
All right.
We're going to see if we can figure out what that phrase might be.
But for any event that costs more than $500, M-dash, a diagnosis that requires ongoing treatment, a pregnancy, the same overpriced, over-complicated mess.
Yeah, there's a missing phrase.
But you all get it.
You can extrapolate, and that's one of the reasons that we love you.
And this year, it's even more complicated because most of the ACA, that is Affordable Care Act subsidies, expire, which means your prices are going to be even higher than they were.
CrowdHealth members have saved over $40 million in health care expenses because they refuse to overpay for health care.
This open enrollment, take your power fact.
Oh, you're about to discover that I missed it.
You just skipped a line.
Oh, wow.
We're just going to go back for a moment.
With CrowdHealth, you pay for the little stuff out of pocket, but for any event that costs more than $500 diagnosis that requires ongoing treatment, a pregnancy, or an accident, you pay the first $500 and they pay the rest.
The system is betting you'll stay stuck in the same overpriced, overcomplicated mess.
And this year, it's even more complicated because most now you can just pick that right back up.
Yes, I can.
Of the Affordable Care Act subsidies expire, which means your prices are going to get even higher.
Which does mean your prices are going to get even higher.
So CrowdHealth members have saved over $40 million in healthcare expenses because they refused to overpay for health care.
Now we get to the part that hasn't been stated yet.
This open enrollment, take your power back, join crowdhealth to get started today for $99 for your first three months using the code darkhorse at joincrowdhealth.com.
That's joincrowdhealth.com code darkhorse.
Important reminder, crowdhealth is not insurance.
Opt out, take your power back.
This is how we win.
Joincrowdhealth.com.
Just one more note about crowdhealth.
As I say in that script, and as we both truly believe, we haven't looked back at all.
We have not for one moment regretted moving to crowdhealth.
And yet if you had asked me, what, three years ago, five years ago, seven years ago, are you willing to give up on health insurance?
I'd be like, no, I mean, we need health insurance, don't we?
This is so much better, and it's so much more honest.
And it really is a way to begin to transform the system.
Yeah, I mean, what it really is, is a reinvention of what insurance is supposed to be, which is a risk pool.
Exactly.
We all get unlucky sometimes, and the group pays for that unluckiness, and we pay something when we are in the lucky category and don't have any condition.
Anyway, that's the right way to do it, not these blood-sucking insurance companies that drain us dry and conspire to exclude us from care.
Indeed.
Off the CrowdHealth soapbox, what have we been up to for the last several weeks?
Well, let me tell you how I saw it.
We embarked on something called the Camino.
The full name is the Camino de Santiago de Compostela.
And it is a famous hike in Spain.
There are many versions of it.
We hiked the so-called Camino Primitivo, which is apparently the original.
Well, actually, we did two routes.
We started with the Camino Primitivo, which goes from Oviedo, Spain to Santiago de Compostela.
It is walked by many as a Catholic pilgrimage.
Now, we weren't walking as pilgrims.
We were walking as hikers.
I sort of see it as a 16-day walking meditation or something along those lines.
was certainly a profound experience in many regards uh we walked with a number of so it was 13 days for the primitiva route that we did which is the original route that the story goes although it's unclear if it's actually true um
Was it King Alphonse walked that route in pursuit of some of the important bones, perhaps, shroud of St. James that lay at rest in the cathedral of Santiago.
And then we proceeded on the Fistera route, which goes from Santiago to the so-called end of the world in Fistera.
And so the combination of those two, of those two Caminos, of which I did not do all of it, was a 16-day through hike from Oviedo to the end of the world at the Atlantic coast in Fistera, Spain.
Yep.
Let me just mention a couple things.
So the bones of St. James are housed in the cathedral at Santiago.
Now, of course, one can debate whether they're actually the bones of St. James, but there is a box.
We did go see the box.
And there is, of course, mythology about how those bones made it from the Middle East into Spain and have been protected for all of these years.
Anyway, it's an important mythological story for Catholics.
You mentioned the shroud.
I think the shroud is actually the face shroud of Jesus, which is at the starting point of the Camino.
So I'm not exactly sure.
Yeah, so anyway, there's, for those who are interested, there is an interesting story in which the face shroud of Jesus actually has a good bit more evidence that suggests that that's indeed what it is than the so-called shroud of Turin, which is hotly debated as to whether or not it is authentic.
But in any case, these relics exist at either end of this famous walk.
And so a friend of ours, a Catholic who was walking as a pilgrim, Matt, had built a route.
He is a very dedicated hiker.
In fact, he does the rim to rim hike annually at the Grand Canyon.
And now he has pushed it even farther to the rim to rim to rim, where you walk from one rim to the other and back in a crazily short amount of time.
In a single go.
So anyway, he's quite the hiker, and he had set up this route and had not gone the year that he set it up because he discovered his passport didn't have enough days left on it.
So when it came time to do it this year, he asked, do you want to go?
And it sounded like an interesting idea, but it conflicted with things.
But anyway, at the point it became clear to you how much Matt had put into planning this route and how completely it had been planned, we decided to move things and go and do it.
It is the Camino has resonance for people, even if they don't know exactly what it means.
And we had first heard of it actually from a colleague at Evergreen who ran study abroad programs somewhat regularly, inviting students to participate in the Camino with him.
Again, there are many, many routes.
There's so many routes that when you say the Camino, people don't necessarily know what it is that you mean.
They often assume the French way, which is longer but flatter.
And all but the one out to Fistera end at Santiago.
So that is the place where people converge upon.
And I will just say a couple more things before you go on, that at the point that it was going to be you and me and our friend Matt going, I mentioned to a friend here on the island, Heather, another Heather, that I'd love to hike with her because I should be training for this.
She said, oh, I've always wanted to go.
And, you know, we barely knew each other at the time.
And I right away thought, oh, she would be an amazing companion on this trip.
Asked Matt if it would be okay, invited her, and she came, and then invited a few of our an additional couple of friends, former Navy SEALs, in fact, Clay and Steve.
And they were able to come.
And Clay also brought his remarkable son, Liam, 20 years old.
And then also Matt had a friend, Chris, and a couple of people joined only for part of the time.
And, you know, almost everyone had issues that caused them to ebb and flow.
Although you and Matt did the entire thing, the entire way, carrying all your stuff.
And it's just, it is a remarkable, it is a remarkable set of experiences that one has.
People go into it with all sorts of expectations.
I tried not to.
But especially if you're walking as someone who is thinking of yourself as a pilgrim going towards a place and knowing that it is only your feet that will get you there, the idea of going, you know, even in my case, you know, over a hundred miles, over 100 consecutive miles, over 150 consecutive miles entirely on foot to a place that in our case, I didn't, you know, oh, the end of the world.
We're going to hit the end of the world of Astera, which truly is actually a remarkable spot, not entirely unlike the spot where we live, you know, as sort of the windshield of the continent for Europe as you look out across the Atlantic.
And here we are, the windshield of the continent for North America, looking out across the Pacific.
But having it be a place that people for generations, for hundreds of years, in the case of Pistera in Spain, went to and perceived that, you know, this way there'd be dragons, this way, you know, who knows what could possibly go on there.
And we've walked here on foot.
It's extraordinary.
Okay, so let me say a couple more things.
One, what we're going to do here is we're going to discuss a couple of what I think are the important lessons.
Having come home, the lessons are arriving over time.
But anyway, I think there are a couple of lessons to derive from it.
We will later in the podcast show some images for those of you who are watching and describe what they are.
But I did want to say that one of the lessons of this, and I don't think it's a universal lesson of the Camino itself, because Matt is an extremely dedicated hiker, the plan for how to hike, which was very well planned.
Many people walk the Camino and they don't know where they're going to stop on any given night.
Well, a dedicated hiker and a guy with a day job.
Yeah, therefore, back to his.
Right.
He got the time off from work.
So anyway, many people walk this at a slower pace.
And Matt set a pace that turned out to be ambitious for everyone, including Matt.
And what that did was it found the vulnerabilities of every single person and pushed us to them and in many cases beyond them, which was an interesting experience because there just wasn't any two ways about it.
It ended up being a 16-day hike.
The average number of miles per day was something over 15 miles per day.
I think in the end it was about 16, about 16 miles per day on average distance and something like 2,400 feet of elevation gained per day on average.
And of course, anyone who does physical things knows that at some point, for many people, it's the descents, it's the downhills that are actually harder.
And so I don't even have the numbers on what the average descending elevation was every day, but it was something, something a little bit less comparable because there were a lot of ups and downs.
We started in the mountains in Astraeus and then hiked into Galicia and ended up at the coast.
But there was, especially in the first half, there was a lot of climb and a lot of descent as well.
So the nature of this, one of the natures of it was that if you had an injury of some kind, this brought it out.
And I think that was true for every single member of our group.
I know I had a ACL repair.
Gosh, when would that have been?
Like 96.
Something like that.
And, you know, it took maybe five years before I was completely over the ACL repair.
And I have thought about it very little since then.
Wow, this brought it out, right?
That repair was not as good as I thought.
And you had to go beyond a certain limit to find out.
In your case.
In my case, an injury I didn't know that I had, but have been worried will develop ever since.
I've talked here and I've written about the Achilles rupture that I experienced 10 years ago playing Ultimate Barefoot on a cold beach in February with my students almost certainly.
In fact, I should drop the almost, except I don't like the idea of certainty when we're making claims like this, almost certainly downstream of all of the fluoroquinolones, that is to say, Cipro antibiotics that I had taken when doing field work in my 20s in the 1990s, now known to cause tendon and ligament damage, specifically puts people at risk even decades later because it's cumulative for Achilles rupture.
So I had completely ruptured my left Achilles 10 years ago, had surgical repair, have, you know, I'm mostly back on that foot.
I have full range of motion, but I'm missing some spots in the middle, which is weird.
But every now and again, I've gotten twinges in my right Achilles, and I always think like, I really don't want to blow up my right Achilles.
And yet I know that for whatever reason, my particular physiology and all that Cipro put me at risk.
So I have occasionally had twinges before, and I was training a fair bit for this hike over the summer, hiking five to eight miles most days, in fact, over the summer.
And on a training hike in Portland where I was under load, walking fast, climbing.
I was climbing up to Council Crest, which is the highest point in Portland, and it was Labor Day, and there were a lot of people on the trail, so I was accelerating fast past people.
I did something to my right Achilles, and I couldn't walk for a couple days.
And this was just a couple weeks before we were due to go on the Camino.
And I thought then, I just, I'm not going to be able to go at all.
The lighting a bunch of the details, I felt certain by a week out, what I need is one more week.
Really wanted to delay the trip, but couldn't do it in an economical way.
So I said, well, I'll try.
So I did the first stage, which happened to also be raining, you know, raining most of the day and pretty grueling, you know, pretty high elevation gain.
And for everyone, the first stage is going to be particularly challenging, no matter how good a shape you're in.
And the last three miles did in my Achilles.
And so once again, I just was like, I don't, I don't, maybe I should go home.
I don't know.
I sort of leapfrogged with you guys for a couple days.
Did in your Achilles, which means at the end of day one, you were basically unable to walk.
I was unable to walk.
And I do not mean that I had torn it or ruptured it.
In fact, I had had some interesting ultrasound imaging a week before in which the guy doing the imaging said, I see the damage.
I see this.
The Achilles is an interesting, interesting structure compared to other soft tissue in the body.
It does not, when it is fully healthy, does not have circulatory tissue and it does not have arteries or veins, arterials or vanilla or capillaries.
But when it is in a state of damage or being healed, you'll see that.
And then you don't, as the Achilles heals, that scaffolding from the previous circulatory structures sort of gets cleared out.
And so you can see a fully healthy Achilles that doesn't have it in it.
And so he says, look, I can see, I can see the damage there, but you have no evidence of any tear at all.
So if you're careful, and he didn't say this, but my feeling is we've talked about this on air a lot before, you don't dampen the signals that your body is giving you.
No pain meds.
Pain meds could have been possible on the days that I decided I just have to give it a full rest.
I didn't end up doing any.
I drank alcohol in the evenings a couple of days during that early injury.
But don't dampen the signals that your body's giving you.
I couldn't walk on it, but I didn't have any reason to think that now I had a tear.
And ultimately, I decided, you know what, I need to give it the week that I thought I needed to give it.
And so I went ahead to Lugo and got unstuck from the book that I'm writing, which was fantastic.
So I did stage one and then stages 10 through 16, you know, the last seven stages consecutively, all of them having given my Achilles a chance to rest.
But everyone, I think, felt some injury that either they knew they were still wrestling with or thought that they had healed from emerge from just the repeated the repeated non-high impact, right?
So walking is not high impact, although some of us found it easier to run downhill sometimes.
And, you know, we really, not, not as a, it really felt easier on the joints to run downhill sometimes.
So other than that, the Camino was not a high impact activity.
And yet just the repetitive nature of it causes the body to reveal to you where it's still got little places that it's glitching out.
Yes, little places that it's glitching out.
So you left us the first day and we caught up to you in Lugo.
You went ahead to Lugo where you hike through.
And when we caught up to you, you joined us and you hike every step of the remainder of it.
I think what we did discover about your injury is that it is not very sensitive to distance, but very sensitive to load, which is interesting.
There's bound to be some interesting interpretation about why that is the thing that inflames your Achilles.
Yeah, so I hiked all seven consecutive stages at the end, but under minimal load.
I sent my bag and only carried what I needed.
But weather and water and such.
very fast, which was interesting.
So all that said, lesson one is this level of difficulty pushed everybody beyond their limits, which then which is fantastic.
It's part of why you do it.
It's part of why you do it.
But, you know, after day one, day one was a little over 16 miles.
It was a bad day.
It was one of the three really rainy days we had.
So it was a little bit miserable in its own right.
But at the end of day one, I looked at the schedule ahead of us and thought, wait a minute, 16 consecutive days of this, plus some of these days are a lot longer than this one.
At that time, there were two days over 20 miles on the schedule.
And that was before we realized that everything was a little bit undercounted because there was often a mile to the place we were staying or whatever at the end.
Yeah.
And I mean, when Matt, our fearless leader and also the organizer had sent the itinerary over at first, I had looked at it and he's got, I had calculated out the average distance and the average elevation gain per day and seen the fact that there were no rest days at all and questioned him about it.
It's like, you really don't want to even just stop in Santiago for a day or Lugo for a day, one of these other places.
And he was constrained by deadlines on either end.
And as much as it would have been easier to have regular breakdays and probably to have an average distance of, say, 12 miles as opposed to close to 16.
And I say this as someone who only did half of the stages, I think I speak for everyone because we all talked about this.
This was the way to do it.
Like this, as difficult as it was, and as much as everyone discovered failures in themselves and found depths that they didn't know that they had or ways that they wanted to proceed that they hadn't predicted in the past, it was for the best that we were pushed and pushed and pushed.
in fact, had no, had no rest days.
If, you know, you and Matt hiked 16 consecutive days and every single morning you got up and went like, okay, like, I know what my job is today.
And that, you know, and that's part of the value.
I know what my job is today.
And for me, because of one of my jobs in life, unfortunately, for better or for worse, is to sort of handle all the logistics and the organization and such of business.
and all of this.
The idea that, oh, we're going to be gone.
We're going to be doing this hike for 16 days.
And then we spent a few days in Portugal afterwards.
So I'm going to have to clear the decks entirely for three weeks.
I'm going to tell the people and we're going to set things up and we're going to, and I'm going to clear the decks entirely for three weeks.
That is an extraordinary gift that is actually hard to give yourself if you're living your normal life and hard to get other people to give you if you're living your normal life.
It's like, oh, can I just, oh, can't we just, like, actually, no, I'm just, I'm, I'm hiking the Camino.
And so that, that is, that allows for an openness and a walking meditation, as you say.
People say, okay, what's my job?
My job is to continue to walk.
My job is to continue to walk.
And everything else that happens as a result is my mind both, you know, shuts down on paying attention to particular pain, if it's safe to do so, then opens up to all the other possibility is unpredictable and frankly miraculous in a way.
Which brings me to the second issue or the second lesson of it, which was that being pushed at this level, let's just say day one, a little over 16 miles.
At the end of day one, I thought, okay, 16 miles is barely in range, but consecutive days of 16 miles might not be.
And what the hell are we going to do about the 20 plus mile days later on?
It did not seem possible.
By the end of the Camino, the last day, we discovered that what we thought was going to be close to a 20 mile hike ended up being a 22 mile hike.
And at the point that I realized it was 22 miles, I said to the other members of our hiking party, you know, I would love to be able to say at this point in my life that I was able to walk 25 miles with my bag and it seems easily in range.
Let's keep walking at the end of this and get to 25.
And then it ended up being.
And all of us thought about slapping you at that point.
Right.
You all did, but everybody said yes.
And in the end, we all said yes.
We did.
So as it turns out, the end of the world, you know, the town of Fistera is two and a half miles from the actual end of the world.
Right.
And so, you know, it wasn't that you were going to create like, let's just walk in circles for three more miles.
Like, no, actually, to get there and back, it's going to be 27 miles because it's another two and a half miles.
Why don't we actually, and we had already planned we were going to do it the next morning, you know, after the, after the official Camino that we had in our itinerary were done.
And we did indeed go back the next morning.
But for, you know, for what turns out to have been, you know, the timing was just so beautiful.
We started on a new moon and right about at the equinox and we walked to the full moon.
And so we were able to see both the night that we arrived, the full moon rising as the sun set, and then the next morning, the full moon setting as the sun rose at the end of the world in Fistera in Spain.
But near our arrival at what would it have been, like 20 miles in on that final day, we came upon a wide, like probably a mile and a half long white sand beach that the Camino itself has you walking, you know, up on land.
And my immediate reaction was, I'm walking on the beach.
Now, I wasn't carrying much load, but I just knew my feet will appreciate it.
My, you know, my entire being, my entire electrical being and physical being will appreciate it.
And although everyone had wanted to slap you when you had suggested 25 miles a couple miles earlier, I think everyone wanted to slap me at that point.
I was like, you don't have to do this.
Like the trail's right there.
Like I'm just telling you that this is what I'm doing.
And then everyone came along and appreciated it.
And the fact that there was a cocktail bar at the other end of the beach didn't hurt.
That's probably why they put it there.
This is probably why they put it there.
But walking in the sand for a mile and a half at the end, you've already walked 20 miles that day.
For you, that was your 16th day of walking something between 12 and 20 miles every day.
And we get there and we're about to be able to check into a hotel.
And, well, let's just drop our bags and then and maybe do a quick change of something and keep going.
Let's go to the end of the world.
Let's make it a 25 mile day.
And on the first day, it felt like for everyone, wow, that was that 16 miles was as much as I could do.
And by the final day, it's like, well, let's see how far we can go.
So we walked.
That's extraordinary.
We walked the 27.
Matt and I kept our bags just because you're those guys?
Just to be able to say it.
But the interesting thing was on the way as we were hiking back to town for dinner, you know, I had a conversation with both of you and said, you know, okay, if you had to walk another five now, could you do it?
Of course.
Another 10?
I think it's in range.
So anyway, here's the lesson.
The lesson is somewhere in that hike, the capacity, which seemed maxed out at 16 plus on day one, was up to you could probably walk 30 if you had to.
We walked 27.
We walked 27.
So 30, maybe 35.
Where'd that come from?
It didn't take that long.
Well, not only did it take that long.
By which I mean 16 days is not that much of a life.
16 days is not a lot of time for that capacity.
I don't think most of that capacity was actually extra capacity.
I think that capacity was there, but the process of suffering in the way that the Camino forced us to actually revealed it.
And which brings me to another point.
You say this is your job for the day.
It's just hike.
It was actually well beyond your job in some ways.
One of the weird things that I found about myself was I had imagined, you know, okay, you hike all day.
Maybe you start before the sun comes up.
You get to town.
Those are good days, incidentally.
The sun comes up, you've already hiked five miles.
That's great.
It feels good.
But I thought, okay, you get to town at two o'clock.
You take off your boots, you put on your sandals.
You've got all of that time to dedicate to whatever it is that you want to do.
And the answer is actually, I couldn't do anything.
The only thing I accomplished on this trip other than the hiking was sort of thinking while hiking.
That was it.
I couldn't focus.
You know, I had a plan.
I had my leather field hat with me.
On day one, it became totally obvious that I should make an attachment on my bag.
I had the parts with me so I could hang the hat so that on, you know, at hot moments, I didn't have to be wearing the damn thing.
16 days later, I hadn't touched it.
I was still, you know, holding it in my hand when I needed it because there was just no bandwidth for anything like thinking through how to hang your hat on your back.
So I will say my very different experience from days four through eight when I had gone forward to Lugo and just had an Airbnb and my job, having cleared the decks, not having to check in and deal with accounting or bookkeeping or just not having to deal with the normal stuff of daily life.
I got unstuck from writing, you know, and I've been stuck for months.
And I just started like a chapter a day.
I'm just, I got this.
And, you know, get up, have some coffee, write at the point that the writing is sort of done, feels sort of done, go on a hike.
And so I started, you know, regetting my, you know, preparing for you guys to catch up with me and did, you know, a 10, 12 miles each of those days once I had had a couple of days completely off my Achilles.
And I thought, I wonder if I'll be able to keep anything like this up once I'm hiking again.
I didn't expect to, but I wondered if it might not be possible.
And sure enough, really not.
You know, in part because it's a time of day thing that we were mostly getting up and starting to hike before dawn.
And, you know, so when is the writing going to happen?
And once you're off the trail for the day, that's, I imagine there are some people for whom their best creative and analytical work is after hard physical work of the day, but it's not for me.
But it felt like, in fact, and some among our party observed that I was so angry with myself after at the end of day one for having for having pushed it when I knew I shouldn't, for being there, for now having to make a decision that might put other people's experience at risk.
And, you know, what was I thinking?
And why hadn't I just canceled my participation entirely?
And of course, not of course, but as it turns out, that anger was misplaced.
And it was a complete gift to know that all the rest of you were hiking, were doing the thing, were doing the work that you had signed up to do and were coming closer towards me every day.
And that I was utterly free to spend my time doing the work that I wanted to do and had not found the mental space to do for a long time.
It was a perfect set of conditions such that at the point that you did rejoin me in Lugo, I was ready to go.
So that brings me actually to the third, what I think is lesson of what may be many more lessons than I yet know.
But I started day three.
You had already gone on to Lugo.
No, I was leapfrogging with you at that point.
You were leapfrogging.
You were leaping.
So then it would be day four.
This is the first day that you weren't in the place that we were staying.
For the first time on the trip, I think it was a 16 plus mile day.
I came off the trail feeling like, actually, I feel all right.
Right.
And I thought, okay, now I know how this works.
It's about equilibrium.
You build up a debt during the day while you're hiking and hiking and hiking, a debt on many different fronts, some of them mental, some of them physical.
But you build up a debt.
And then you have a certain number of hours to recover before you start building up more debt.
If you don't recover as much as you've spent, then the point is you start the next day at a deficit and that's not sustainable.
You'll keep building up that deficit until you can't do it.
So that one day I glimpsed this equilibrium.
And then that night, as I was falling asleep, my throat started to get so sore that I could barely swallow.
And I knew I was about to get sick.
And it's like, well, wait a minute.
If I had just barely gotten to equilibrium and I'm now about to be sick for who knows how many days, it's done, right?
I can't do this.
And I decided that the only way to find that out was to try and fail.
And I tried the next day.
and did not reach equilibrium, but I got close enough that I wasn't going to quit.
So anyway, the point is equilibrium is really the thing you have to target.
And it's, I think, also in part the reason that there is nothing that you can do with the remainder of the day.
So I started, I discovered a quirk for myself.
There's sort of a couple different approaches to you got to get this long hike.
Apologies.
You got to get this long hike done.
You could go slow, suffer less, but for more hours, or you could go fast, suffer more, and have more recovery time.
And that was definitely my preference each and every day was to get to the recovery point faster and use those hours to get back to equilibrium.
So that's not inherently the right way.
Well, I think in advance of going to, we had our group, which included eight people.
There were never more than seven people at a time because of the two who came and went at different moments by advanced planning rather than for reasons of injury.
We had talked about, and there were shades for me, memories of prepping for study abroad trips.
And it was a very different situation.
I wasn't in charge here.
I was glad not to be in charge here, but I also didn't have any, we knew all but one of the people participating, but none of us knew everyone.
And we hadn't been together in a group like this before.
And there was some expectation that we all start at the same time, we all finish at the same time, we all walk at the same pace.
And I had an immediate negative response to that.
I thought that's going to be mind-numbing and body numbing and impossible, frankly.
And it's going to make everyone miserable because you're either altering your pace to accommodate someone else or you know that others are accommodating are altering their pace to accommodate you.
And either way, it's not going to be a happy, happy or a healthy situation.
And so without really an expectation for myself about whether or not I would tend to want to be going faster or slower or in the middle or, you know, knowing that I would want to sometimes be talking with people.
And boys, there's just so much opportunity for deep conversations when you're walking that many hours a day.
You know, at the least, I think the shortest day was a four-hour day.
And I think we did an 11-hour day.
Right.
So you just, you know, you're walking for so much of the day and you get to know people and things come up that wouldn't come up if you were merely breaking bread, which is another beautifully human way to connect with people.
And of course, we all did that as well.
You know, you come off the trail and you all sit down to a meal together.
And that's wonderful too.
But it's the, especially the dyadic or triadic conversations on the trail when you're walking at the same pace with someone and people behind you may be catching up or falling behind.
And as long as people aren't falling behind because they cannot continue and need help in order to get to where you're all collectively going, you know, we all were looking out for one another at that level.
But if someone wants to go ahead and other people want to stay behind and there are people all in between, as long as you have a sense of the collective good, there is zero reason to expect everyone to act the same way.
Especially in this case, it's unnecessary because...
I would say especially in every case, but...
Well, the problem is, if this was a backcountry hike, chances of somebody getting off track is a problem.
You always have someone bad in cleanup who knows what they're doing and can make sure to, you know, in a backcountry situation, you do need to have some different established rules.
But in this case, just so people get the picture, the Camino routes are not perfectly, but very well marked so that at every point that you walk out and, you know, do I go that way or this way, it's not always super obvious.
But if you look, there's a yellow arrow somewhere that tells you this way and not that way.
And so the point is.
And when in doubt, trust the yellow arrows and not all trails.
Right.
All trails will lie to you.
But in any case, the point is, in that circumstance where the basic point is, look, you can pick your own speed because you're not depending on somebody else to navigate for you.
It does work out properly.
And people did have very different preferences for whether or not to, you know, build up more debt over fewer hours or less debt over more hours.
You know, I think it's sort of an area under the curve kind of a question.
But for me, the hours of recovery at the end were more precious than the managing the suffering on the trail, which I think is why there's no bandwidth left over when you get where you're going.
You take care of basic needs and nothing else gets done because you are recovering in every sense.
You are, you know, you've been mentally focused on, you know, where's the trail and where do I go?
And, you know, keeping your feet going one after the other and dealing with all of the little pains and things that dog you day after day.
So.
Yeah, focusing enough on the pain to make sure that it's not important and then and then putting it out of your mind.
Putting pain out of your mind if you have assessed and know to reassess with some regularity, you know, is that important?
Do I need to tend to it?
But the act of saying, no, sorry, body, like I get it.
You're yelling at me in some regard, but we're just going to proceed here is itself an energetic act.
It is.
And the rule I made for myself, which I think it would be a general rule for how to do this, is pain is fine.
Damage is not.
If you do damage, then you're basically adding to a debt that you're going to have to pay at some point.
If you suffer and then you get off the trail and stop suffering and then you start suffering again the next morning, that's sustainable, but you have to get used to it.
So something about much of the capacity that clearly grew radically over the course of the hike was not really a capacity, what your body is capable of.
It's sort of what you're capable of enduring, which I found interesting.
And then this equilibrium thing, you know, equilibrium is, I think, one of the most powerful concepts you can understand.
It's actually, I'm tempted to say it's one of the most important concepts in complex systems, but really it's equally important in simple systems, right?
It's a very powerful lens with which to look at processes.
Yeah, you have manifestations in complex systems like homeostasis, but homeostasis is a specific case of equilibrium.
Right.
And the equilibrium does not require a living world.
You know, I mean, if you put a hose in a bucket, the bucket will be out of equilibrium, building up water until you get to the point at which it can't hold any more water.
And then the amount of water flowing out of the bucket is identical to the amount of water flowing into the bucket inherently.
Or gas diffusing across a semi-permanent barrier and reaching a steady state, equilibrium.
Yep.
So anyway, I thought all of those were sort of interesting discoveries.
And they changed how I would approach any such activity in the future.
So anyway, I will.
Do you want to say more about that?
Well, I mean, I think I wish that on day one, I had been tracking equilibrium.
And the idea is what happened on day one?
Day one was hard.
What would you track?
What are the indicators of equilibrium that you would be tracking?
The indicators are morning of day two, how do you feel relative to morning of day one?
That's still, how do you feel is pretty vague.
Yeah, except that the body is very good at monitoring details.
And all I can say is that on a day-to-day level, something kicked in.
I think it kicked in about the evening of day four, and then I lost it because I got sick and I started losing ground against the equilibrium.
And then, you know, day, gosh, it must have been day eight.
Matt and I both, almost at the same moment, went from physically being able to descend any of the hills that we were confronting.
Suddenly my knee flared up and he had leg issues too.
And actually when Chris joined us, he reports that on that first day, at the end of the first day, in the last two miles or so, that Matt and I were like going downhills backwards to avoid, you know, inflaming the stuff that had gotten bad.
Still on foot, though.
Still under full load.
Still on foot, still under full load.
Backwards.
But, you know, each time something like that happened, a setback, it was like, well, okay, now, you know, how much ground did I lose against equilibrium now?
And where am I going to get it?
And it was those periods in between the hikes in which you regain and you get back to a place where it's like, yes, I'm suffering every day.
I'm in pain, but it's working and it's not getting worse.
So I think that that's a general approach.
I don't know.
I'm interested to talk to people who, you know, suffer for a living because maybe this is something that they have a take on.
I'm sure it is, actually.
But, all right.
So those are the three punchline lessons that I've got at the moment.
Surprise.
One, two, three again.
I'm not sure I could do three.
The first is that a extremely rigorous physical endeavor like this finds every defect.
Yes.
And so things like, you know, I thought now it seems naive.
Including deep historical defects that turn out not to be fully healed.
Right.
Yeah.
So or fully healed, but imperfect.
So let's see.
Let's take my ACL.
My ACL has not bothered me in decades.
So it felt like, well, pretty much a done deal.
But if you ask me as a complex systems biologist, what are the chances that the surgeon got a repair so perfect that it's truly indistinguishable from a functional ACL that you're born with and develops correctly?
Chances are zero.
So not surprising that you've got to get pushed really far out to some limit before it's like, oh, the slight asymmetry in that repair is now a problem.
And I think that in general, even successful medical intervention is more likely to result in iatrogenic harm than an injury that you were able to recover from without medical intervention.
So I'm thinking, and they're not comparable, so it's not really a fair comparison.
But for me, I'm thinking of my left Achilles, which I experienced a full rupture of and had surgical repair of in 2015.
And the boat accident in 2016, which caused all body damage except for my head, you know, across pretty much every system, including a tear in my right meniscus of my knee, which there was so much other damage and pain, I didn't even know it for four months.
And I went and was like, now this, like, oh, that's clearly part of the boat accident as well.
Let's do surgery.
I said, no more knives.
Thank you very much.
You're not touching my knee.
And I did experience, as you were talking about on this hike, other places where I have had injuries in the past, specifically where I've had surgical repair in the past because I've had some broken bones and such.
But my right knee never gave me a bit of trouble.
And it was a year after the boat accident in which, among other things, I tore my right meniscus before I could kneel.
So, you know, that was a real injury that is, I think, completely healed.
Yep, which is interesting because the scuttlebutt on cartilage is that it doesn't completely heal.
Oh, they told me it would not heal at all.
I would never be able to kneel again.
It would be painful for the rest of my life, all of which were wrong.
And I don't, you know, as always, I don't know.
I didn't know then, and I don't know now to what degree the people giving me the bad advice were legitimately confused themselves or working an angle that was better for them than it was for me.
So this is a subsidiary lesson.
The subsidiary lesson is that doctors should be taken with a grain of salt.
And when they tell you that you're getting too much salt, you should tell them to fuck right off.
Okay, so lesson one.
Oh, speaking of which, there's another lesson that we learned on this trip that everyone we were traveling with already knew, which is the value of electrons.
Yeah, all right.
That's fair.
It's a very practical, practical little lesson.
Okay, so lesson one on my list was that a rigorous activity finds every defect and that the things that you think were completely healed may not have been, especially if they are doctor-healed in nature.
Yes.
Second lesson was that you build up capacity through extremely rigorous work, but that a lot of the capacity isn't in the form of new muscle or something like that.
It's in the form of the discovery that you actually had reserves you don't know anything about, which is actually a really good match for some biological systems too.
I'm thinking of the ability to hold one's breath.
It turns out that when we normies are in panic mode, right, that actually we've only used a quarter of our capacity and that you have, you know, three quarters left to go.
And that was some of the value of the itinerary that Matt created for us all was you wake up, you go.
There's no choice.
You've got a reservation there tonight and the next place the night after.
And like you can't, you make a change now and all the dominoes fall out of order and you just, you mess up everything.
So the non-choice nature of the you have to do this again today was part of the value.
Yep.
I think it revealed a lot of things that would not have been revealed if there were lots of ways to avoid it.
And then the third, so you've got, it finds every defect.
Capacity largely comes from reserves you don't know you have.
And the third thing is that the parameter to track is equilibrium.
You don't have to hit it each and every day, but if in general you're failing to meet it each and every day, that's unsustainable by definition.
You have to get to a place where the amount of recovery you do is equivalent to the amount of debt that you build up, at least on average, over several days, or you're in trouble.
And anyway, sort of surprised I didn't know all of these things, but I didn't know all these things until this forced march over what turned out to be 255 miles.
Oh, I will just say, I don't think we've mentioned it.
The last two days ended up being close to 50 miles, if not 50 miles in their own right.
Yep.
So that's another measure.
Not only was the last day 27 miles, but two consecutive 20 plus mile days that added up to close to 50 or 50 would not have seemed possible in week one, not remotely.
No, and there is, of course, there's a psychology, there's a psychological benefit to knowing that you're coming to the end.
In two days, I won't have to wake up and do this again.
Tomorrow I won't have to, I can push as hard as I want because I can, because I know this is the last day.
And in fact, I did, I explicitly knowing that went particularly fast on the final day early on because I have a particular penchant for being alone in the dark when I'm walking.
And so I wanted to get up ahead enough that I could be, that I could, there was, we were coming up on full moon.
We were real close to full moon.
And in deep forest, you need a little bit of a headlamp, a little red headlamp, but being alone in the darkness, which is utterly safe unless you trip and hurt yourself.
Like there's no wildlife there and there were no people that were at risk.
But it's really extraordinary.
And it would have been a stupid move to do that with four days remaining.
Right.
Right.
Like, what do you, you're going to wake up tomorrow and have to do this again?
And you have no reserves left.
There was something else I was going to say there, but I lost it.
Well, I'm sorry if I disrupted you by blowing my nose, but it had to be done.
All right.
So do we want to, having discussed these various points, show some images of what we were looking at?
Sure.
Okay, let's do that.
And then I will just say that there's another segment at the end of this that you have prepared on a topic that I didn't think to worry about.
Well, actually, that's not true.
You're the one who said something to me about it, and then I found an article about it.
Apparently, I was not in equilibrium when that happened.
And it has been lost in the debt.
But in any case, so there's another segment at the end of this, but let's show some images and we'll do some describing.
Yeah, and if we don't get to the sort of grotesque story at the end, we'll do that on Saturday.
Oh, wonderful.
Okay, good.
All right.
So unfortunately, Jen has had the unenviable task of putting together a bunch of images that were sent to her out of order.
So anyway, these may be not in the right order, but it doesn't matter.
Well, and the right order raises questions.
You know, I sent things chronologically.
So that was from the first day.
That's in Oviero.
That's a scallop shop in the pavement in Oviero.
And this also a sign from the very first day.
So the scallop is part of the mythology.
Apparently, the bones of St. James arrived on a ship that was understood to be encrusted in scallops, which Heather and I know a little bit about scallops.
Find this an unlikely part of the tale.
But it's charming.
So scallops are the symbol of the Camino.
And so the signs always indicate a scallop.
So one thing that was frustrating is that you start northern Spain, about a little east of halfway between the two borders.
And it's the autonomous zone, would be known as a province in, say, Canada or a state in the United States, of Asturias.
And in Asturias, the scallops, and I think we'll have a couple of signs here.
The scallops point in the direction you're going, meaning in this case, it would be up.
Okay, so that is the direction that you are going to.
Which makes some sense because that's the direction that scallops swim.
Right.
And then the story is that once you hit Calicia, Galicia, the autonomous zone to the west, which is where both Santiago is and where Fistera is, that the scallops are reversed and they're now pointing in the opposite direction, but you should still follow them, even though they're now pointing the other direction.
That is confusing.
It is unclear to me.
I did not look into the history why that should be the case.
But what is worse by far is that actually in Galicia, it becomes haphazard which direction the scallops are facing.
And in fact, in one case, I actually found one facing a third direction.
So what you do is you follow the yellow arrows, rather like Oz in the yellow brick road.
You follow the yellow arrows, and you should pay attention, though.
If you see a scallop, you know you're on the Camino.
So there's that.
Maybe another picture now.
This is one of the places we stop.
So there are little either churches or just places to rest along the way.
This is actually from Teneo, one of many, many, many cats that we met along the way.
All right.
This is Lugo at night from the top of the Roman Wall.
I think you got to the top of the Roman Wall since I was in Lugo for several days.
I walked the top of the Roman wall many times.
And that actually, by the way, it's a beautiful picture.
Thank you.
But it also shows one of the main sort of experiences of probably any of the Camino routes, but certainly this one, is the mixture of, you know, ancient and new Spain, which are kind of jumbled together, which is interesting in many ways.
You come upon flat-out ruins built.
In the case of Lugo, the old city center has a Roman wall that was built around it.
It's a two-kilometer circumference, and there's several access points.
You can walk around it.
And when I first got to Lugo, I was told, oh, any time of day or night, it never closes.
Is it safe?
Oh, it's safe.
And that was my experience of it, that it's this amazing, ancient Roman wall that is maintained to be safe.
And that inside, you can, you know, onto the inside of it, you can see modern, but still clearly ancient in terms of its bones, Lugo, and outside of which, which is what you're seeing here, you see modern structures that still look older than most of what you would find in the United States, but modern, in this case, apartment buildings.
And so this was one of the Romans guarding the Roman bridge just outside of Lugo as you head out on the Camino outside of Lugo.
Lugo to Santiago.
Oh, again, this is from the top of the wall.
The bridge that you cross outside of Lugo.
You want to say something about these guys?
Yeah.
This is what's called an Oreo, spelled with an H.
And what this is, and actually we saw over the course of this 250-some mile hike, the change in the construction modality of these things.
But what they are is, as you so romantically termed them, rat baffles.
This is a mechanism for storing, my understanding is often food for livestock, storing it in a way that rats can't get to it.
And you can't see everything in this picture.
So they're built.
I think you have a picture later on that maybe shows it a little bit more.
We'll show it better, but they're built up on posts that rats can't climb.
But even if they can, then there's these overhangs that rats can get.
Yeah, then there's an overhang, so you'd have to be a super adept rock climbing rat to get over the thing.
And then they're also one of the characteristic features is that they will often have a stairway built up to them that does not physically connect to the structure.
So a human being can step over a gap, but a rat can't jump the gap to get to the structure.
In that case, it was an interesting part of the story that we were told.
I feel like a rat could, but a rat won't know that it can.
We will have to interview some rats and find out.
Yes, let's do that.
All right, next.
Oh, it appears to be me.
Yeah.
That is you walking.
I don't remember where some of the stone.
Oh, here's a house clad in scallop shells.
Rather like the ship that carried St. James was supposed to be.
Oh, it's just a gorgeous town.
Again, you see the scallop, the iconic version of the scallop there.
Those are the signs that direct you all along the way.
And all right, now here, one of the scourges of the Camino is the, I wouldn't say ever-present, but you frequently run into these wind farms full of these windmills.
And let's just say many a landscape has been destroyed by these things.
Say what you will about how sustainable you actually think they are.
It is at least very sad that so many beautiful vistas have been taken over by these noisy, utilitarian, dangerous to birds and bats structures.
They're all over the place.
I forgot to remind myself of what his name is.
Sorts of the V, the monster near on the Fistera road between Santiago and Fistera, who just showed up.
This was what, a 15-foot-high statue, maybe?
Yep.
We rounded a corner and there he was.
There he was.
Yep, without much explanation.
This is one of the first views of the ocean after, for you, 15 days of hiking.
And quite, quite dramatic and remarkable.
Again, approaching the ocean still, it's, you know, when you see it first, it feels like it's closer than it is.
Here's on the beach that we are walking near the end of the last day, just footprints in the sand.
The full moon.
That's going to be the full moon setting, I believe.
No, that was the full moon.
Rising on the last day of our hike.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Given where we were.
Yep.
That was the full moon rising.
And here's Kilometer Zero.
Kilometer Zero, the so-called end of the world.
And I must say, early in the trip, when I was struggling and trying to figure out how the hell I was going to do this hike, given how difficult every day was, my thought was maybe we don't do the hike from Santiago.
Don't do the final three days from the other side.
Don't do the final three days.
And if we don't do it, it's not the end of the world.
And most people at least stop in Santiago.
Yep.
And we went back there.
So next picture, if we can.
Yeah, here we are.
I don't remember where that is exactly.
I don't either.
This is going to be the last morning, I think.
Yeah, the last morning.
With Matt.
And then this is actually the first day.
This is near the end of the first day.
So we're out of order here again, which is because that's how I sent them.
You are hiking.
I'm in Lugo.
You were pointing to being coming to Lugo.
This is a fantastic picture of you, Brett, and Matt.
This is us touching the cathedral in Santiago, which was the end of our Camino and the beginning of our, I guess, second Camino to the end of the world.
So symbolic.
Ah, this one requires a little explanation.
So Heather noticed, no, not noticed, discovered that our hike was actually going to begin on the fall equinox and that it was going to end on a full moon.
It began on the new moon.
I think it began the day before the equinox, but it began on the new moon and it ended on the full moon.
Ended on the full moon.
And it was a super moon too, which only means that the moon is very close in its orbit to the Earth.
So it appears larger than it normally does.
Which meant that on the day after our hike ended, that we could hike out before dawn and we could watch the moon set and the sun rise simultaneously on opposite ends.
And here you can barely see the moon descending into the marine layer.
And that's Liam.
Liam sitting on a rock looking out at it.
And if you were to turn around 180 degrees, we have a picture of it.
Maybe it's next.
You'll see the sun rising at the same moment.
So anyway, that was a super cool coincidence that the hike ended on that particular moment and that we would be in a place that you could see it.
That we could actually see it so dramatically.
Yeah.
Oh.
Yeah.
You know what that is?
I saw your caption.
Oh, you saw my caption.
Yes.
Yes.
This is two wandering Jews.
That is the name of that plant.
Yes.
It's Zabrina, I think, is the genus.
Anyway, Zabrina, for whatever reason, is called a wandering Jew.
And then I am the second wandering Jew in this picture.
And it is possible that that was a mother-in-law's tongue in the corner that needs water.
All right.
This is a, well, I'm just going to tell you.
This is a guy.
So one of the things that happens on the Camino is because you're all hiking in the same direction, you end up seeing certain people again and again.
And anyway, this old gentleman whose name is Jesus was hiking in parallel to us.
And I did not witness the event, but apparently at one point, he discovered that one of the hikers who was hiking in parallel with us was an IDF soldier who had returned from Gaza and was clearing his mind on the Camino.
And Jesus apparently publicly berated and humiliated him.
So anyway, that is just a simple fact.
But anyway, that is Jesus who walked slowly, but by his own account without stopping and without pausing and somehow made it long distances every day, including through very tough terrain.
that is a shadow of you and me It is indeed.
Wow, is that Matt, Chris, and me about to get flattened by a tractor?
Yeah, that was so.
This is one of the things is that you're hiking through active agricultural land.
And anyway, so this was not the most common thing to happen to us, but it definitely happened a few times where some very large piece of farm machinery suddenly showed up in the, you know, most of the trail is not road.
And what road there is is mostly pretty rural, though occasionally you're walking by a highway or something.
But anyway, this monster loomed up out of the fog.
And in fact, I think I remember there was another one similar that was looming up behind us and they somehow had to pass on this little road.
Yeah, sometimes the logistics were challenging.
Now this one requires a little explanation.
This ugly photo is document the absurd fact that much of what appears to be wildland in this hike was in fact eucalyptus, which is an invasive.
It's not supposed to be anywhere but Australia, but it's of course, as you and I have talked about multiple times on the podcast, destroying California, destroying South America.
It's an extremely aggressive, invasive that makes for very hot fires.
It thrives in fire.
And so, you know, it doesn't set fires, but it thrives in fires.
Yeah, it's very oily.
So places where eucalyptus has replaced the native vegetation become more prone to fire, which is part of what happened in the Palisades fire in January.
And the Oakland fire of 1980, whatever that would have been.
90-something.
But anyway, so not only is eucalyptus invading these lands, but it's being widely planted.
And this is a case, we saw this many times.
This superficially wild land is actually a grid of eucalyptus trees, which are being planted because it's a very expedient wood to plant.
It grows very quickly.
It's a very hard wood, and it is effectively completely immune to any parasite that you would find in this place.
So if your point is to get wood out of the hills, planting eucalyptus makes sense.
If you're at all sensitive to the ecology, it's a devastating mistake.
But we saw it all over the place.
Many different kinds of people are walking on the Camino.
Here, that was a person with a prosthetic leg who was walking at a very good clip.
I must tell you.
He was impressive.
There were so many good cats.
Yeah, this was an especially nice.
This is an especially nice cat.
And here we are arriving at the cathedral in Santiago.
A subset.
That's just five of us, but yeah.
The destination.
They're these in the catacombs under the cathedral.
That's the box that the bones of St. James apparently are within.
And this is the town with the soccer game on.
What was its name?
Negrera.
I don't.
Was this that town?
Yeah.
And this is us walking out.
So Negrea, the night before, actually, was one of the few nights that we did find resources, internal resources with which to go and do something else.
And so you, me, and Matt actually went to a local soccer game, which was amazing.
We won.
Yes.
We, having walked into Negrera from Santiago, came to care deeply about the team being that Negrera had put forward.
We won 4-0.
We got to the game after one of the goals had already been made.
But despite you, me, and Matt all trying to capture a goal on camera.
We did not manage it.
Yeah, we did not manage it.
we went to the game which was i think a high point for for both of us it was really fantastic to be at a local game where everybody was you know out of their minds with joy that their team was you know successfully competing in the uh the round robin before the we walked ourselves into enemy territory first because we were late arriving and we were standing uh in in the back of the um the stands and we scored and we were all excited and we got so many dirty looks warm
More than that, you and I, having spent so much time in Latin America, know that what you do when your team scores a goal is throw your hands into the air and you say, goal!
Which we did, not realizing that we were standing in the away section and immediately got many dirty looks.
We were not, however, killed because the Spanish are in general a forgiving people.
But anyway, it was a closer call than it might have been.
We moved afterwards.
But so the next morning, we left before dawn to hike out of this really charming town and then promptly got lost in the forest because the trails that were supposed to exist did not exist.
I will say, because we were advised that there was another way, so we departed from the well-signed...
No, we were advised that this would be a good...
The word they use is diversion, but it turned out to be just not quite as good a diversion as we were hoping for.
Yeah.
That is you and me looking out at the peninsula on which the end of the world exists, the town of Fistera, and you can barely see the beach that we walked down.
Oh, yeah.
Footprints.
Yeah, so we're still a couple, couple few miles out at that point.
Oh, I included this video that I took in Teneo that just shows some of the cat culture that's all over, especially Asterias, Les Sal Anglicia.
But you just have several cats doing their things here, checking each other out, deciding whether or not to get into fights or whatnot.
And yeah, there's not anything.
None of them use the trampoline.
I don't know why.
But I thought that this video did a decent job of actually conveying just how many cats there were.
And in this particular town, I was a few days out from having hurt my Achilles.
I knew that I was going ahead towards Lugo at this point.
So I was trying to gently test my strength.
And so I walked around a bit and found lots of plates of food and saucers of milk out for these cats.
So these cats are not individually owned, as far as I can tell, but they are appreciated.
In fact, I talked to a couple locals and no one had ill words to speak of them.
They appreciate the cats and presumably they're doing cat things like keeping the rodent population down.
There are a few cats who hang out at the edge of the Camino, apparently knowing that there are a certain number of hikers that fancy cats.
I assume they occasionally get a snack.
Yes.
Yeah, just some walking.
you're the final day so um here we are in the rain I've forgotten what this little outpost was called, but it was a very beautiful ancient bridge.
And there was like a little castle there next to a river.
Yeah.
Really, it really felt fairy tale-ish.
And in fact, when we got over this bridge, that's Liam and I walking with Matt in front.
It was signposted as, you know, voted one of the most beautiful towns in Spain.
We didn't need the sign to tell us that, but it certainly was.
Yeah.
So this is more soccer.
More soccer.
You won't see a goal, unfortunately.
Stop motion soccer.
All right.
Oh.
This is going to be Heather, our friend Heather, coming down.
In the rain.
In the rain.
Yeah.
And there you have it.
I think that's.
Day one setting up setting.
I think I was fixing something on Matt's pack maybe there.
Ponchos, we all know, do nothing aesthetically for a person, but they actually keep you dry.
They're actually, I was the one in our group who went with a poncho rather than a rain jacket.
And you're cooler in a poncho, and they look ridiculous, but you stay dry.
You're cooler in one way and a lot less in the other way.
Oh, so this was the first, this, interestingly, was the first Oreo or Oreo, you said?
Yeah.
Oreo that we passed.
This was the first day in my Achilles was killing me.
So I was sitting in an old church right nearby here.
But this one has obviously parking underneath, as is presumably traditional.
But you also see, in this case, the stairs that come up under.
And so I don't think a rat could make that jump.
We saw, so you had mentioned the staircases have a gap.
And some of the smaller ones we saw where the stairs were coming up adjacent to the Oreo, which looked to me like rats could do it.
But here, they're not going to be able to get up there.
And the owner of this one actually let us take a look inside and told us it was about 100 years old.
And she proudly showed us that it was constructed without metal fasteners, which actually matches my favorite line from the Little House series where Pa finds himself constructing their house and doesn't have any fasteners.
And he says a man does not need nails to make a door.
And so he uses basically pegs.
So anyway, that's that.
That is that.
Well, so there are some more pictures.
And I thought you had included some more pictures of people who you asked last minute and we got an okay.
So, oh, this is going to be, you guys, top of the hospitalis route.
Hospitalis refers to structures that were constructed, governmental structures, ancient, that were constructed to protect pilgrims walking this route in the high altitude where you could get caught in very bad conditions.
And you can see actually that we are above not only the tree line, but the cloud layer.
And we walked in this neighborhood for three days.
We were above clouds looking down on them, which was pretty cool.
Stone walls.
This one was curved, which is something we saw frequently.
Oh, this is me realizing where I was tilting at windmills.
Sure.
Sure, as you would.
As one does.
As one does.
You're our friends Clay and Steve.
Clay and Steve.
Ah, and this is Father Giuseppe and Father Tanzi, who were friars who were walking for a number of days in parallel with us.
And we had lunch with them one day and had an interesting theological discussion.
Anyway, they were cool guys and appreciated them.
Did you tell me there was something unusual about their footwear?
Did I make that?
Oh, they were wearing sandals.
They were wearing sandals.
And they were wearing these robes the entire time, which often seemed like it would be hot, but they did not complain.
Of course they did not.
And they gave Mass in a couple of places.
A couple of places.
So many of the sort of stopping points along the route are churches.
And they stopped in and they took confession.
And they were actively doing the communo as pilgrims and as friars.
Yep.
This image is called I Shall Not Be Damned.
Is that right?
Because of the damn behind.
Yeah.
You see.
Yep.
Well, I know that disappointment is constant.
But anyway, maybe that wraps it up.
Yeah, maybe that wraps it up.
And Saturday, hopefully, we will return and I will be over whatever little cold I've picked up.
Yes.
And maybe I won't tease the topic that we were going to go to today.
But it is not nearly so wonderful and mind-enhancing and body-enhancing as what we've been talking about today.
But it is current and part of the scourge of modernity that we are suffering from.
It is a classic example of just when you think it can't get any stupider, it gets stupid.
Here we go.
Yeah.
So we will say, we will save that for Saturday.
We'll be coming back on Saturday with a live stream after the first of the weekend's Patreon conversations that you're going to be having.
And then we'll be back again on Wednesday and get back onto our Wednesday schedule before taking a little step aside one more time for a little travel soon.
But gosh, I feel like there's so much more to say.
I can't think of what it would be.
So until we're back in front of the cameras with you, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
