July 1

July 1
Carrion de los Condes to Terradillos de Templarios 26.8km
To beat the heat of the day we left our albergue before 6:30am. Another day on the meseta with easy paths underfoot, beautiful views, and few changes in elevation.Visited with an Italian couple, more about them later, and Paul, a Korean living in Vancover who has been traveling by foot for 32 months. He began his travels in Australia, onto Africa, his homeland, Vietnam, India, where he volunteered in Mother Teresa´s house, Europe, where he has done the camino twice. Along the way, he volunteers teaching English to needy children. His next stop is Africa, where he will volunteer teach in a school for the handicapped. He says he loves working with the handicapped children best of all, and is often shamed by how much we westerners have in comparison to the rest of the world. A truly wonderful young man. Later, we met another young man who although having a high powerer career, tired of living from an office, so he took a job in a think tank in Madrid last summer, but before starting work he walked the camino. It was so life changing that he is spending his vacation walking a portion of it again this summer.
During our mornings on the camino the paths are filled with snails and slugs. We began to see a different species of snail today with a more colorful shell. Gastropods and birds made up the wildlife we saw today.
We have mentioned before the caminoese. It has come to make me think about the biblical references to speaking in tongues.  Seriously, it´s amazing what you can understand, and how you can be understood.  For a couple of days we kept pace with a Japanese couple who spoke no English, however they really appreciated that we would greet them and ask how they were doing whenever we saw them.  So, in Burgos we were catching a municipal to the Cathedral, and they saw us and somehow asked us in Japanese about what we were doing, and then caught the bus with us.  We figured out where to get off and explained it to them.  They became very concerned when we didn´t get off right away, and came to get us, but somehow we let them know that we needed to talk to the driver first for directions.  The next 3 or 4 days we kept pace with an Italian couple.  He is having horrible foot problems, and so appreciated Mike checking in with how he was doing.  She has been a little beside herself having to do extra because he can´t, so she has depended on me for translating at albergues, etc.  She speaks only Italian, of which I know only a few typical expressions, but somehow I am able to get directions, etc. for her.  The real test came yesterday at an antiquated farmacia (pharmacy) where she was trying to explain her husband´s problem to the pharmacist, and he was trying to tell her about an urgent care.  Somehow I translated it all well enough for both of them to understand.  Today, I did the translating for a couple who spoke Korean, and two women who spoke French at the albergue.  And Mike, a french woman and I were able to figure out a very confusing section of the path together with caminoese and maps.  You see what I mean about speaking in tongues, it is only through divine intervention that all of this communicating could happen.  It is truly amazing!
A word about toilet paper.  Of all the many blessings of living in the U.S. did you ever know that toilet paper was one of them?  Not only it´s abundant, unquestioning supply, but its quality.  When I first came to Spain many years ago, the toilet paper was all the talk, and the big joke, one friend even kept a scrapbook of the toilet paper.  Let´s just say it hasn´t improved much, though I´ve yet to see the brown paper bag with one waxed side variety yet this trip, so some improvement.  We can only hope we never need to use a lot of it!
Venga!  Buen Camino.
p.s. The picture of us by the two roadside statues shows that we are now past the halfway mark.