"If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
to serve your term long after they are gone
and so hold on when there is nothing in you
except the will that says to them ´Hold on!´"
-Rudyard Kipling
Ended up staying another night longer in Palas. The nausea had gone, but I still had some lingering digestive problems that made it unwise to stray very far from a toilet. Ended up leaving on the 19th, in the pouring, pouring rain knowing that it was going to be a tough day. Still, fortified by my coffee and orange juice I was on my way. I had 26k I wanted to cover to Santa Irene which would allow me a quiet little 23 and 20k to reach Santiago.
Crossed the border into A Coruña about 9k into the day. A Coruña is the province that Santiago is in, and it's the last one that I'll be walking (or at this rate, swimming) in. At this point, I was wondering whether I'd make it at all. The nausea had returned while I was walking, and I had to stop several times because I thought I was going to lose my non-existent lunch (I hadn't really eaten much of anything since falling ill). In concert with the rain, which was heavy, persistent, and seemed to come at you from every direction, I was miserable, soaked to the bone, and starting to get the shivers again. Thoughts of taking a bus into Santiago kept on popping into my head, but I decided to walk at least until the next "city" before I made that decision.
Somewhere in the 9k between the border and Melide, the next city, my brain ended up just shutting down; for about an hour and a half, I didn't feel wet or cold or happy or annoyed; didn't feel anything, and I can't recall what I was thinking. Just had to keep walking. Just walk to the next kilometer marker and you can rest; just walk around that curve; make it halfway up that hill; and then ultimately, one more step, one more step. By the time I got to Melide, I was gone; finished. The only thing that had kept me going since Ponferrada was the desire to finish what I started. Now, even that didn't seem to matter much anymore. I was hungry and weak, but there was no point in eating, I was soaked and couldn't get dry, I was tired and still had another 50k to go to Santiago. Might has well have been 500k, it was such a low point for me.
Stayed in Melide, only making 18k from Palas. Decided to test my stomach again by trying to have a substantial meal; my first in 4 days. Fortunately, even though it didn't sit quite right in my stomach, it stayed down and I started to feel a bit better. I'd knew I'd probably have a bit of trouble with the next day's walk. Thanks to my short trip to Melide, the next day had to be a very, very long one. 30k or so. I didn't decide to not take the bus until the next morning. For some reason, I decided to keep walking. The weather still wasn't cooperating; raining buckets. It actually had´nt stopped raining since I made my weather prediction in Palas. I don't mean it rained every day since, I mean it had not stopped. It's only really a question of how hard it was raining at any given time. I heard on the news that parts of Santiago had been flooded the night before; sounded like God would rather destory the city than have me go there.
I felt good the first half of the walk to Brea, half-decent for the next quarter and half-dead the last quarter into Brea. If the weather would have cooperated, rather than trying to make Galicia into a lake, it would have been a beautiful walk through fields, forests and countryside. Oh, yeah, and Arzúa, which is another ugly little town. Checked into a hotel in Brea (I've seriously had it with Galician albergues - they've all been soul-crushingly awful), and after a half-hearted attempt to get clean (the purpose of the shower was more to get warm), I promply collapsed into my bed, too tired to do anything else. The next day would be the last, I kept telling myself. I'm getting to Santiago tomorrow. If not on foot, then in a coffin.
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