Okay, it’s time to tell the story I mentioned a few days ago.

It was the day we went from Lorca to Villamayor Monjardín. The albergue we were planning on staying in is run by a Duch ecumenical group, and Michael had stayed there before. He could not stop talking about how great it was. How excellent the food was, how great the company was, and how awesome the after dinner meditation was. So, needless to say, we were gonna stay at that albergue.

Now, those who know the camino may know that we would be passing the famous wine fountain that day. So everyone was very excited, and I was a little curious to see what Alex and Theri were like drunk. They had been hyping themselves up, and I was wondering.

As we were leaving Estella, an old man stopped us to give us directions. I didn’t fully understand them, but Alex did, because Alex speaks Spanish, Catalan, English, and a bit of French. Anyway, what I understood was that we were to go right, not left. Alex clairified that this was after the wine fountain, not before it.

Well, we arrived at the wine fountain just fine, amid a cloud of tourists. I got some water from the much ignored spout next to the wine spout, and went to check out the beautiful cathedral. Alex and Theri bought a bottle of wine, and we had lunch outside the cathedral with several other pilgrims we had been seeing each night and on the road. Michael, who we had left behind in Lorca to slowly sip his coffee, caught up with us. I set out before the rest of the group, because, well, I really needed to find a bush to pee behind, and then Michael caught up with me, and we set out.

The walk was beautiful. It was sunny, and the yellow arrows lead us on a winding trail going up and down hills and through the forest. Michael told me about the books he was planning on writing, the amazing series of coincidences that allowed him to learn irish boat building and eventually making the flutes from shells, and lots of other things. It was facinating. Every so often we stopped to look at the castle on top of Monjardín, which he told me I could get the keys to the gate for from the bar next to the hostel. I was looking forwards to that. It looked like a beautiful structure on top of a conical hill, and I so wanted to explore it.

Anyway, Michael was in the middle of telling me about dog training when I become the hero of the story. Or at least, I become the hero the way he tells it, but it wasn’t that big of a deal.

I looked up, and saw that I couldn’t see the castle in front of me anymore. My first thought was that we were almost there; I couldn’t see the hill with the castle because we were on the hill with the castle. Then I turned around, and there it was: behind us.

We got off the trail and into the spiky bushes to check our guidebooks and avoid being run over by mountain bikes, and sure enough, the trail should have gone right through Villamayor Monjardín, and another town before it. We had been following the yellow arrows constantly, and had somehow gone the wrong way.

As we wandered down dirt roads, navigating by which ones looked like they lead the way we wanted to go, we wondered what happened.

“Oh, you know what it was?” Michael asked, remembering.

“What?” I replied.

“Remember that person eating an apple in the ditch? The road split there.”

“We went left,” I said, suddenly remembering the instructions I recieved many hours before, and laughing.

The way Michael tells it, I saved us from either a night in the cold or having to walk all the way to Los Arcos. Me? I think it was a lovely mistake that we made, the route we walked was beautiful, and I would do it again. Well, not the having to dodge a bicycle race part on the way across the valley, but that’s just the camino, right?

Right now I am listening to a wonderful person I met today play If I Only Had a Brain on a flute made out of a seashell that he had made himself, using a method that he invented. It’s pretty rad, and involves the amazing fact that the natural shape of the shell allows for a perfect eight note scale to be put in with holes, and then you can motify how hard your blowing to get to twelve notes, or maybe even more. Alex did his disertation on microtones, and so has been utterly facinated by these flutes. I think they’re pretty amazing too, actually. They have a really cool tone. I bought one, actually.

The maker of the flutes, Michael, is just a wonderful person. He knows a lot about a so manu different things. This is also his second or third time walking the camino, I’m not sure which. He joined me, Alex, and Theri today, and it was a welcome change of energy. Alex and Theri are great, but a new person changes and freshens things in such a wonderful way.

I’m using the word wonderful a lot, but it’s such a good word. It can simply mean that something is really great. For example, I use wonderful to describe Michael because he is so amazingly pleasant. But wonderful also means that something inspires wonder, which the camino certainly does. It is something special to look back behind you from the top of a hill and think “that is where I was this morning. That’s where I was yesterday.” And then you can turn around and keep moving, because there’s still a long way to go.