Since we have some extra time here in Espinal, waiting for everything we own to dry, I thought I’d write down a few thoughts I haven’t mentioned yet.

First, radiators work great at drying socks. :-)

Second, the WordPress blog is great, but their iPhone app sucks. Especially at trying to compose posts offline (with no WiFi or cellular data connection) but also in a lot of other ways, like dealing with photos, or in some cases, just not losing entire paragraphs of text that I had to painstakingly tap out with one finger! It’s not the perfect travel app I was hoping for.

The GPS Kit iPhone app is, however. Not only does it show me my current position, as well as the distance and compass direction to any point I select on the map, but it does it without a data connection. Plus, it let me import a GPS track someone made of the entire Camino, so we always know where we are, and whether we’re still on course or not. You could get by with just the painted yellow arrows, but anyone that knows me knows I love a good use for technology, and this is a perfect match.

And the last random thought for today is about why I wanted to do the Camino. As Kathey mentioned earlier, it started when I happened to watch the movie The Way as a Netflix auto-suggestion last August. I was immediately intrigued. What a great new twist on the whole long-term, backpack-travel, stay-in-hostels idea. But 500 miles!? No possible way that would ever happen. But still…

Over the next few months, I just kept thinking about it. I couldn’t get it out of my head. It just sang to me. And I’ve already talked to several people, from multiple countries, that say the same thing. It just sang to them somehow and they couldn’t stop thinking about it. I started wondering things like how long a tube of toothpaste would last before I ran out, or how many pairs of socks I might need. How much money would we need per day, and what kind of walking gear would we need? Then when we finally decided to do it, we started making a packing list in Excel, and weighing every last item that might go in our packs. My underwear weighs 2.125 ounces, BTW.

Other people say the same thing, and they all know how much their underwear weighs too. The Camino just calls to us. It’s like the people from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, except maybe without the mashed potato sculptures.