Where the heck are my laurels?

When I arrived in Santiago de Compostela on Thursday afternoon, the end of the journey was a bit anti-climactic. I did not follow a blinding white specter of Santiago Matamoros to his tomb. I did not fall on my knees and kiss the cobblestone plaza in front of the historic cathedral. I didn´t even buy a t-shirt of a skeleton with a walking stick that reads "el Camino me mata". I just felt hungry and tired. After consuming two multiple course meals in a span of four hours, I still felt the same way I´ve felt for the past two weeks - ready for the next one. I am not not not starving. I have eaten relatively well on the Camino, but when I heard the term "caloric deficit" while listening to the final chapter of "Into the Wild" last night, I thought to myself, hmmm... I bet I´ve got that. While I enjoy eating, a bottomless stomach is something I´ve never been accused of having. After the second dinner - well, after the hot chocolate and cheesecake after the second dinner - I went back to the hostel, ready to rest on my laurels for a while.

I couldn´t find them anywhere. I know exactly where I had packed them, remember stuffing them into the sleeping bag compartment of my pack at the last minute. They simply weren´t there. One of two fates likely befell them. Either they were lost somewhere along the way, like my headlamp... may it find a good home. Or I unintentionally dumped the laurels after the second day of walking when I feverishly emptied my pack of anything that I deemed unworthy of its weight. The following are some of the casualties of the weight purge. The list should illuminate two things: 1) How naive and inexperienced I was in the initial packing process, and 2) How severely the weight of my pack had affected the functioning of my brain in just two days. (You can play a little game here by guessing whether each item is representative of condition 1 or condition 2. I´ll try to make it pretty obvious.)

• Deodorant. This item was invented for the backpacking lifestyle (lots of sweating, few clothes, fewer opportunities to wash those clothes, occasional showers...) Oh, and if you can´t remember how much a stick of deodorant weighs, go pick yours up now...
  
• The majority of my guide book. Before leaving Madrid, I bought a very thorough guide to the Camino (one of the best decisions I´ve made in 2008). Of the guide´s 100+ pages, only about 15 pertained to my route - el Camino Primitivo - so I tore out those 15 and dumped the rest.
• Green Life is Good Frisbee. Frisbees don´t weigh much (175 grams), but they are awkwardly shaped for packing. And ummm... winter in Spain...?
• Black Paper Holder. This is a great accessory for a job interview. It´s slim and sexy and leather-esque. It´s good for holding a resumé and up to one other piece of paper. I´m pretty sure it´s why Eaglebrook hired me. Now it´s in the trash in Salas.
• Crónica de una Muerte Anunciada. This García-Márquez novel is brilliant. A classic. How do I know? Because I have already read it and own a copy at home. The day before leaving Madrid, I purchased this hardcover copy of the book from a street vendor for the very reasonable price of 4€. Now it lives in the Salas albergue with the Frisbee.
• A lock. Why? To lock things I guess. The world is scary and dangerous, so before leaving the safety of the United States I was a good consumer and bought padlocks, a money belt, and an obscenely heavy cable bicycle lock.
• And almost... almost threw away my Alf stationary. I included the photo of said stationary, so you have an idea of how awful it would have been to lose this fine item. I know that Alf is a bit overweight, but honestly, how much weight does he add to my pack? This is probably the clearest indication of my deranged state after two days of walking...

In response to my brother´s comment on the bedbug fiasco, I did not call the 24 hour taxi service. I want to clarify the ambiguity of my previous entry. After removing my clothes, stuffing them into a plastic bag, and tightly tying that bag (from which they have not since been removed), I showered and then spent close to an hour meticulously scouring my sleeping bag and removing the bugs. Because they came from the bed - and not from me! - the bugs were basically restricted to the outside of the bag and the area around my head where they had begun to enter... so getting rid of them wasn´t as difficult as it could have been. I then slept in a different room on six brown chairs that - because they lacked sides - could be pushed together to form one of the least comfortable sleeping arrangements my body has ever experienced. The hard, cold floor would have been far more comfortable (for its uniform nature), but I didn´t trust the floor because obviously that´s where bugs end up if they fall out of bed, right? I slept for about six hours, then woke up and walked to Santiago. But I can imagine how someone might call a taxi at 1 am in that situation.

As long as I´m on the subject of my least favorite albergues, I should probably give honorable mention to the one in Padrón - just outside of A Fonsagrada. It was the one albergue with a television, which I would have traded without hesitation for heat or hot water - it had neither - but because it was there, I had to turn it on. And because it received only three channels - and it was dinner time - I had to watch the national news for the fifteen minutes it took for the novelty of the accelerated electron images to wear off. During that time, I learned that the top floors of a Las Vegas casino hotel were on fire. A fire - with zero casualties - in an American hotel made the national news in Spain. For in depth analysis, they called on their correspondant in New York City, who, from her vantage point (in North America), was able to offer special insight as she watched the same footage of the fire (presumably borrowed from CNN) that we were watching. She literally said something like this (I´m not being funny), "As you can see, this hotel casino is a tall building with walls and windows, and it´s on fire. The color of the flames and the upward movement of the smoke suggest that this is a hot fire, which is behaving in accordance with known scientific laws regarding combustion." At first I thought it odd that TVE called on their NYC correspondant - surely Mexico City would be closer geographically - but then it dawned on me that New York City is closer emotionally. Only a person in the United States - or maybe one of its territories - could really gauge the emotional response of the American people to this victimless tragedy. The absurdity of this report made me consider a few things:

1. Why not save a bunch of money by getting rid of international correspondants and replacing them with correspondants in front of blue screens (not that much further from Las Vegas) a là the Daily Show with Jon Stewart?
2. Does my poor sense of world geography prevent me from realizing that this sort of farce occurs all the time on American international news reports too?
3. No wonder the internet and blogs are such a popular form of news gathering. While Constanza Martínez essentially offered subtitles for a video clip of fire, there was probably someone in the hotel updating her blog: I lost $85 in the slots but the buffet dinner was so good I didn´t even care. They had those eggs I love! You know when they cut them in half and stuff them with OH MY GOD! Why am I getting all wet? The sprinklers. I think there´s a fire in the building! I´m going to move quickly and calmly toward the nearest fire exit.