Yesterday's rest day brought a lot of new faces. A nurse from Austria, a surfer from Germany, and a future priest from France. Which meant the Berliner and the Almighty finally got their money's worth. Well, I got my own confession in the end too. With the future priest, who drinks 3 litres of beer a day and smokes a pack of cigarettes, I had a long talk about my life, and we eventually concluded that every relationship has its good and bad times, and that you don't just throw in the towel, even if you're going through a midlife crisis. So, with the future priest, I found the answer to my currently hardest question — the one about my job. The future priest started his Camino in Lisbon, and his plan was to quit smoking and drinking, though that's not going too well for him here on holiday. If you ask me, a holiday isn't meant for giving up bad habits — if anything, you overdo them even more. But to each their own. He told me the road from Lisbon has no nice views and that it wears down the soul. The nurse came on the road to say goodbye to a 16-year-long marriage, since her husband cheated on her with her best friend. A double betrayal. She said she was really stupid for agreeing to marry him in the first place. I told her the only stupid thing is thinking that way now. 16 years ago it was the right decision at the time, and life is unpredictable — you never know what's waiting around the next bend. If she had good years with him, she should remember the good times and now give a chance to new ones. She cooked us lunch, later we hung out together by the pool, and in the evening we said our goodbyes, since everyone was heading their own way — she home, the priest to Santiago, and me to Porto. The next day I woke up rested and well-slept, got up at 4:00, because I wanted to set off early on account of the heat. My legs were fast on the road, but in the end the cobblestones killed them — this stretch dragged on for 15 kilometres and destroyed me mentally. It just wouldn't end. My feet started hurting, so the team and I went for a drink and a long talk. The Almighty and the Berliner said I'd achieved a huge amount on this Camino, and that maybe it'd be better if I spent the last 14 days of my holiday having fun and resting in southern Portugal. That the heat was too much and that I should be a bit gentler with myself. So I decided to finish walking in Porto and take the bus the next day to see Lisbon, and then head south, where Luka and a lot of beautiful beaches are waiting for me. I'm not tired, honestly — I could keep walking — but I'm not here just for the walking. In 32 days of walking I managed to cover almost 1,500 kilometres, which isn't nothing, and down south I'll probably rack up another 200 or so pretty quickly, since I can never sit still for long.
