Lots has happened. I finished the walk a day early due to all night mobbing. I got to Finisterre on the 24th and slept on the beach. Epic. After two days of stress, a twelve hour train ride, I night spent in a bush in Alicante, and eternal wet feet I arrived in Pedreguer, a medium sized fishing village on the east coast of Spain between Valencia and Alicante. I am working for an old man named Ken Upton. He looks almost exactly like Bilbo Baggins. His house is a cluttered rat hole filled with experiments and alternative energy generators built out of plastic bottles and crap. The man is a genius, and completely insane. I will be helping him invent hydrogenerators, build homes for fishes, maintain and sail his boat Puff which is rigged with a horizontal sail system that Ken invented. I am currently the only volunteer and I have my own fully equipped apartment. I got the wood burning stove working with a little persuasion from a hammer, and I finally got the gas for the hot water and range going. I have a house. It is sweet. Lots of rain in Spain for the moment, but it is so good to be in one place for a moment. I may be moving onto the ship soon. Time will tell. While it rains we have been occupying most of our time drinking tea by the fire and talking about ridiculous science.

After exactly one month of walking, Santiago! I'm here! It's very odd. Now that I've reached the end I don't know how to feel. Part relief, part sadness, large part tranquility. It is raining and I will now continue for another 100km to Finisterra and the ocean.
       During the time I spent walking alone I discovered that cows are good listeners. When I would come across a group of cows I would tell them a story or some other kind of oration, and they would listen attentively without interrupting. Polite creatures, cows.
     Clothing blowout has become an issue. The buckle that holds my pants up has shot off. My base layer shirt appears to be rotting. One pair of socks has disintegrated completely. The rest of my socks have become poison as the toes of my boots have torn away and the mud flows in and out of my shoes freely. I just hope these boots will keep their soles until Finisterra.

Cities are a plague to me. I am currently stuck in Ponferrada with night falling rapidly. I have to either hike through the city and the sprawling suburban nonsense, sleep under a bridge, or find an albergue. We shall see. Also of note, I was blessed by a monk. I went to a service at a tiny church in the isolated mountain town of Rabanal del Camino. The only people in the church when I entered where two towns people and three monks dressed in saggy black robes sitting across from each other along the walls before us. We waited in silence, three more pilgrims filing in. With the six of us, we nearly filled the place.   We sat still in silence for some minutes until the bell echoed its chime for seven o-clock. As soon as the resonance ended one of the monks, a cherub faced man who may have been forty, began singing in the most beautiful voice I've ever heard. He looked straight forward and sang in Latin. It sounded exactly like one imagines a monk singing to sound. He would sing one phrase, then the other two monks opposing him would sing a response. The entire service, lasting nearly an hour, passed like this, in song. At times we would stand, at times they would sing from a book, but always the same format: the one singing solo, and the other two responding in harmony. It was hypnotic. At one point the lead monk approached us, had us stand, and blessed us in song, asking for protection on our passage. After that they stood up, and silently left via the back door. Very cool. No pictures, because that would be unfathomably rude.

The whole town was filled with kids jumping over pumpkins.

We slept there.

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Random excavation of human skeletons.

It got cold.

There are hobbit holes everywhere! Whole towns of them!

I´m walking by my lonesome now and headed off the flat valley up towards the mountains. Things happen so gradually that sometimes I don´t notice when I completely change landscapes. At one point I found myself walking through rolling hills covered in oaks, and I wasn´t able to remember how I got there. Very odd. More pictures here.

The trail was following along the side of a road that seemed to be frequented only by tractors. As we came around a corner I noticed a creature lying on the side of the road. It became apparent (in the slow way that all things do while walking) that the creature was a dog, a Jack Russell Terror my by guess. There were no houses nearby, nothing but bushes, a very odd place for a dog to decide to nap. Just as I was beginning to hypothesize (again, slowly) the dog's ears perked up and it moved into a crouch, head low, preparing to attack. I stopped in my tracks but it was too late. The dog sprinted at me so quickly that I had no time to react more than by throwing my hands up. As it leaped for my waist the potential future generations flashed before my eyes. When no pain came I looked down to find the dog hugging my leg. I've never seen a dog hug before, but that's exactly what it was doing. It was staring up at me,  its little dog arms just embracing my knee. When I tried to shed it and leave it behind he attached himself firmly to my ankle with his dexterous little paws and I had to haul him down the street, step by step. Pictures to come, as always.

Walking. Still walking. Mostly through farmland punctuated by tiny towns with massive churches. The sun has come out finally, marking the end of nearly a week of rain. Cold mornings with crunchy frozen grass. About halfway to Santiago now.

Drawbridge for real!

Abandoned mansion ruin where we slept.

Cave dwellings cut into the land.

San Tiago himself

Ancient organ sheet music.

More pictures here.

We have found winter in Spain. Tonight will be our first night sleeping inside. We were chased in by torrential downpours that had us looking for arc building materials along the trail. We could see the sheets of rain coming from a mile off and they hit us like a wall of instant soak. My "waterproof" pants didn't stand a chance. As we walk I like to imagine that the pain that has come to live in my feet and knees is just part of the process of sin digestion. The wrong doings have to work their way down the body, you know, pausing at each joint as we pause at each church. I have stopped taking pictures of churches and other majestic buildings because any photo is a disgustingly poor representation of the real thing and gives no sense of the neck-breaking grandeur of the architecture here. Pictures still to come.

I'm on day 5 of the Camino now and really feeling like a pilgrim. There has been little time or location for internet access, and the trend is likely to continue. As the walk has been done millions of times I will be documenting the one thing that makes our expedition a little different: the places we sleep. Most people stick to hostels the whole time and we are trying our best to sleep under the stars in the most epic locations possible. Thus far we have passed a night in woods populated by witches, beside a burbling waterfall, in a broken and forgotten castle, and in an olive grove. Pictures and details to come.

I am trying to sell an article written about the multitudes of forgotten ruins that are strewn across the Italian countryside. To fuel this goal I went on an expedition into a part of the nearby town of Pescosolido that was destroyed in an earthquake in 1915 and has since been ignored and forgotten. It was epic. The ruined alleys and buildings, doorways and windows, were crumbling skeletons of a narrow neighborhood built onto a vertical cliff. The odd location is the reason for its destruction as the houses had much poorer foundations than those locatated on the top of the hill. The place was totally overgrown by massive ivy vines that wound up the walls in intricate braids, some vines as thick as my arm. There was not a soul there except for one goat, the guardian of the ruins who kept a watchful eye from his station atop one of the cracked walls. Pictures to come.
On another note, some flattering quotes from Benoit about me: "Simon you've taught me two important things: First, to get after it. And second, you are the craziest person I know, but good crazy." ( excerpt from a heart to heart over beer in an empty bar)
"Simon, you look like a sexy dad." So I guess that's who I've become, a crazy, sexy dad that gets after it. Oh well.

The random souls you meet in the world are really remarkable. There are a couple new additions to the rustic farm crew, one of which is a French guy named Pierre who happens to have a car. This is a commodity that has thus far been so out of reach that we haven't even considered the things we could do with one. We decided to go on a field trip after work to go see a bear in a nearby town. The town is called Campostella and is built in a circle around this pit that looks like the caldera of a volcano. The houses are stacked up around the rim with only one road extending down to circle the pit. We were standing in one of the local hangouts, a lookout with a view of the pit and the rolling hills behind it, where old men come to drink beer and coffee and bullshit about the day. We asked one of them why all the houses were built around the edge and no one lived in the pit.
       "Would you want to live alone like a cockroach in cold dark pit?" was his response. I told him no.
In recent years they have fenced in the pit and put a walking trail around it to provide a small sanctuary for bears. There were mixed stories about the solitary bear that was the current resident. One man told us it had belonged to a guy who's house had been possessed by the police because he was crazy. No idea what he did, just that he was a crazy old man with a bear in his basement. The other story was that the bear had wandered out of the hills of the nearby Abruzzi park. Regardless of how it got there the bear is a brown hulk that looks like a black bear with the massive head of a grizzly. I was really sad that I had forgotten my camera as the bear crawled its way up the crumbly dirt bank to the fence where we were standing to smell our hands. I have seen a handful of bears in my days, and this was by far the clumsiest, slowest, and least confident ursine creature I've ever seen. There was talk about scaling the fence to race the bear, but sense won over in the end.
          We were shooting the shit over coffee and beer, watching the sun change the streaks of high clouds to royal colors over the strange circular town. The buildings, bundled together and piled atop one another as they are, took on the golden glow of the end of the day and the whole town stopped to watch. There were three old men leaning on the balcony over the hole with us, drinking beer.
      "Italian beer, the best in the world." One of them said. Italian men love to highlight certain aspects of their life and declare it "...best in the world." It's a recurring theme and spans from makes of car, pomegranates, wine, food, women...etc. We told him that we were sorry, but Peroni, the Italian beer of choice, was terrible. He thought this was the funniest thing he'd ever heard and went to tell his friends what we'd said.
      After the sun set the residents all went back to their various lives and we were left alone aside from one old man leaning against the wall. As we were walking past him to leave he waved at us and said,
   "Where are you from?" This was shocking as there is no one in this part of Italy who speaks a word of English.
   "South of San Francisco," I said, the standard way of describing the Santa Cruz area.
     "I've been there. I've been to San Jose." This was doubly shocking as no Italian that I've run into has traveled outside of Europe. He was a short man who looked as if he could have been seventy. He wore glasses on a big nose and wore a blue baseball cap, jeans, and an old beige knit sweater with black buttons.  It turns out that he was an artist who painted murals and various decorations in houses. He spent four years near Stanford painting the dome of some Villa. He had painted various buildings in San Jose and spent another four years painting another dome in Florida. He had spent his whole life traveling around the world painting for people. I promised him that when I made it back to California I would go to find his dome.

Leia, the most beautiful donkey in the world.

There are crosses on top of all high things here.

A well with no water.

I'm back from the hills. It was beautiful. The trail was seven hours of switchbacks going up steep, rocky faces and through pastures. I reached the top just before a beautiful sunset and equally gorgeous moon rise. The moon was just a day early of full. I'm reading "Of Mice and Men" in Spanish and at one point I was able to turn off my headlamp and read by moonlight alone. I decided to sleep on the summit just beside the summit marker on a limestone shelf that was a little sheltered from the wind. The night was not very windy, or cold. The weather is so confusing. I was bundled up the day before I left, coat, hat and scarf. Then while I was hiking up the mountain it was unbearably hot. This ended up causing problems as I only brought four liters of water, hoping to encounter some along the way. No such luck. The hike down was a thirsty experience. One liter for the whole way down. Terrible planning. When I woke up on the summit, it was to two hunters, rifles on shoulders, staring at me with their three birding dogs. When I explained what I was doing to them they were supremely confused and told me I was crazy. Apparently Italians don't sleep outside, and they didn't understand why I would want to or why I didn't use a tent. I tried to tell them about the charms of the moon, but they just shook their heads and smiled at the crazy American. Pictures to come.