230 Miles Down... Ouch!

I tried my best but I just couldn't go very far today. I went 14km and my feet were so bad I had to stop. I came to this hostel right in the town of Fromista, by the train station. I'm sure I'll regret this later when I'm trying to sleep and the trains come through. However, it was the first hostel I came to and it had wifi. I arrived at like 10:30am, only walked about 4.5 hours including my breakfast break. I now have to entertain myself here all day- so wifi was a must. I want to walk into town to see the church but my feet just can't do it. There is an old guy cruising around on his bike outside... Maybe he will let me borrow that bad boy. We will see.

When I got here the owner came out and asked if I was staying. I didn't know yet because I wanted to see what my feet looked like. I knew how they felt, but I wanted to see. I got a coke because I'm addicted and drank that before I could manage to peel off my shoes and socks. When my socks came off, the sight was not pretty. Blisters the size of half dollars on the bottoms of BOTH of my feet filled with puss and looking like thyme were about to burst. I honestly don't know how they didn't while I was walking. I started crying when I saw them and the guy felt so badly for me it was only slightly awkward. I don't really know why I cried, but I just didn't want to believe my feet were that bad. I wanted to make it at least one more town, I wanted to maybe even rest and then continue on my scheduled journey later today.

With these feet, I don't know what to do. There is a 20km walk tomorrow which will take me to a town where I can catch a bus to Leon- a big city. I think i can make it. If I skip ahead to Leon, I skip about 4 days of walking. If I rest here, I'll be bored out of my mind. I'm hoping Leon will have a store where I can buy some Nikes. I hate hiking boots, I hate hiking shoes, I just want some good old Nikes to finish this walk. I'm sure I'll pay about a million bucks for them, but I don't care. I'm not quitting. I might be skipping a couple of days, but a big city will have a good pharmacy, a good shoe store, and will be interesting enough to take a day off or two and let these blisters heal.

Some people say on the Camino your sins are forgiven through your feet. Well God, if this is true, I think I get the point...

As for my 14km today, it was actually quite a nice walk. I hate the gravel path because when I step on a rock in the right spot on my foot (every 4 steps or so) it hurts so badly. However, there was a canal after about 10km of walking that made everything green around it. If I wasn't focusing on my feet I would have really enjoyed it. I was stopping a lot to take a deep breath and battle through the throbbing... In doing so I was taking pictures of what I was looking at. The picture for this post is before I got to the canal and green part. It was right as the sun was coming up and the gravel was kicking my butt. After about an hour of slow crawling basically, I turned around to see how far I had walked, and this is what I saw.
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