The Camino de Santiago

Now that I’m home and my feet still hurt a couple days out, I’d have to rate the trip as not only epic… check out the pics when you get a chance…. but also relatively challenging aka brutal. There was no single hardest day on the trip that everyone could agree on, but every single day was a challenge in its own regard. When we rolled into camp there was no playing Frisbee or shooting hoops like on previous bike trips. We collapsed at a table and maybe summoned the energy to play some cards…explore town, forget it…it was probably old and closed anyway. And then we’d string long day after long day together, so if you rolled into camp after a 35 km day at 8pm and barely had time to eat dinner before the sun set, you could bet that there’d be no break, you’d be up at dawn lacing up your boots for your 11th consecutive 30km day. Blistered feet, the Camino doesn’t care, wet clothes, Camino doesn’t care, music and dogs barked all night and you didn’t sleep at all, Camino doesn’t care, got food poisoning and threw up all night, guess what, you’re putting in 30k at 7am. So if you see someone strolling around town with a weathered Camino shirt, not one of those that worried moms buy and wear to the airport that still smell like detergent and have a crease in them, but one that is bleached out from the sun, has black bands on the shoulders from pack straps, and has salt stains that look like they’ll never quite come out, know that he has been tested by the Camino and has passed.

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4.1 - Cycle20Ten - Cross Country Bike Trip - Summer 2010

As we pressed on for 10 consecutive long days we all had the cool lofty peaks of Glacier on our minds for some R and R. We left our last town of Dupeyer and knocked out 40 hilly and dry miles to the infamous Browning, Montana. Known as one of the top meth spots, we were sure to keep an eye on our bikes and make our lunch break short and to the point. Just for fun the wind really cranked up for our last 12 miles and we pressed on at our standard headwind pace of 8 mph, not to be held back from Glacier, our salvation and much needed rest. We arrived in the middle of the afternoon of August 1st and parked our bikes for three consecutive days off, unheard of for the Cycle20Ten team to that point.

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4.0 Philmont, New Mexico - Summer 2010

Before hiking Philmont none of the crew had hiked more than 30 miles. So we set out on training hikes and had planning meetings. We assembled gear and checked it off. Philmont requires a lot of gear. Everyone’s packs weighted at least 20lbs, some weighing as much as 50lbs! That’s a lot of weight to try to carry on your back if you’ve never hiked before. Finally, after 4 hikes totaling approximately 86 miles, we were ready to go.

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3 - Habitat for Humanity Guatemala - June 2009 - Chapel Hill, Carrboro, Boy Scout Troop 845

During a typical day we arrive at the worksite at 8am, and the sun is already rising high and the temperature is climbing just as fast. One team sifts sand out of gravel while another team uses impossibly short shovels (everyone here is a foot shorter than us) to mix mortar by hand. The mortar mixing is a rather tough job as it takes about 20 minutes of mixing by turning over chunks of mix and water that gets ever heavier as the batch progesses. At other times we moved 400 cement blocks up a muddy hill and restack them into the rooms of the house and later use hachets and machetes to shape them into the size block that we need. I dare say standard US scout skills do not cover how to properly and safely shape cement blocks with machetes.

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2.1 Bahama Sea Base - Summer 2010

The Bahamas, land of sun, sand, and wide blue oceans. During the summer of 2008 a group of scouts had the opportunity to spend a week on a large reconstructed ship sailing around the beautiful Great Abaco Island. Arriving in Marsh Harbor, our group took taxis down to the dock and set out in a dingy to our new home for the week.

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