When I was a young kid my parents had a volume of cartoons by an artist embedded with GI's on the front line slogging through Europe in the Second World War. I read it again and again when I was 6, 7, 8, and I was particularly struck by the many references to hurting feet, bad boots, and trading packs of cigarettes for dry socks. And Mark Helprin, in his terrific WWI novel "A Soldier of the Great War" posits that one can predict which soldiers will survive the war and which ones will die by whether they have hard tough feet or soft ones.

I think I can relate.

Thank you everyone for your blister advice. I've tried pretty much everything, greasing, patching, draining and treating with iodine, changing socks in the middle of the day, but nothing seems to be solving the problem. I attribute it to good old genetics.

And blisters made today's walk a bit of a struggle. Much of the 14 miles was on ok terrain, but it still hurt. There was about a two mile stretch that was the most treacherous part of the walk so far (even worse than the mud outside Zubiri). An ascent and descent on rutted, uneven earth, a lot of it with deep impressions of tractor tires presumably made in the mud that then hardened in place, all with embedded stones large and small over every square inch so there were just no flat spots to place one's feet. Really tough. And then the last couple of miles of the endless entry into Burgos in the 85 degree sun had me drooping pretty low. My backpack felt like I was carrying a house.

And after yesterday's remarkable social interaction, today's were disappointing but brief. I thought of a friend's caricatures of political correctniks in hippie-infused Eugene, Oregon. First a woman from whom I got a holier-than-thou vibe from before she even opened her mouth. She proceeded to wax poetic about her 15 days on the Camino and said Burgos is where she's finishing her walk and then she'll go back to Australia. I asked if she'd come back some day to continue the walk. She said "I'm trying to live every moment in the present and I don't want to think about the future." I said I need to take a break and I let her go ahead. Then there was an Englishwoman with whom I was chatting for a few minutes while strolling and when we rounded the bend a factory came into sight and she said how awful to see such a thing. I said something to the effect that I don't mind, after all we're crossing a real country in real time. I think she though I was nuts. I needed to take another break. And then there was the American woman at a bar I stopped at who said blisters were a gift from God and we shouldn't question His ways. Ok. I'm afraid I haven't yet had that flash of religious enlightenment that makes me completely non-judgmental of others and love humanity in all its foibles. Give me a few more weeks.

The day was redeemed as usual by the rolling hills, the panoramic views, the sun burning off the morning cloud cover and the mists rising off the distant mountains, the villages with their wonderful walls and doors and shadows, the evocative urban grit on the outskirts of the city, and the beauty of the center city as I inched closer to my hotel. And the fact that I've made it all the way to Burgos!

After sleeping, I mean not sleeping, with seven others in cramped quarters last night, and after being startled awake the night before in my funky pension at 1 AM by a couple fighting with each other in a room down the thin-walled hall and then not being able to go back to sleep, I checked into a luxurious hotel in central Burgos. I'm here for two nights and I'll be taking tomorrow off. That means I don't have to put my shoes back on for about 40 hours, and come to think of it I don't have to move either.