day nine, 320,000 steps, 530ish kilometeres to go

320,000 steps. That is quite a large number. Part of my original plan with buying a step counter was a purely academic curiosity to try to get some handle on really large numbers. I knew that I would be making an insane number of steps to cover the breadth of northern Spain, but it will be truely amazing if I hit a million. What an interesting quantity to add to my conceptual understanding of what a million really is. I find myself imagining telling a classroom of math students that a million is approximately the number of steps required for a five foot ten inch, 165-185 pound, 23 year old man, carrying 10 kilos of stuff requires to cross 800 kilometers of northern spain :-P, then making them do all of the exercises to convert all of the units back and forth to begin to develope a conceptual understanding of what they are. Then my brain starts running off into curiosities about what the margin of error is on my step counter, how accurate it actually is. If it was off by 1% that would be +/-3,200 steps so far. Thats more than a kilometer. But 1% is a remarkably good margin of error and I feel that a small mechanical gadget attached to my waist band must err by considerably more than that..... Interesting.
Having said that it is also interesting how nine straight days of walkig is affecting me. Most of the time I find myself walking alone during the day, occasionally meeting up with someone that I know, and walking and talking with them for a couple of kilometers, until one of us wants to take a break that the other doesn´t, or we have enough will to force ourselves to mantain our own pace rather than falling into step with each other. I figure that I have walked somewhere around 250 kilometers already, much of it alone.
Each night I usually catch up with the two Irish brothers who are walking out in front of me and we go to the local restaurant, get dinner and try to see how many bottles of wine we can get the restaurant to serve us with dinner without extra cost. Then we come back to the Albergue, roll into bed between 10 and 11, with the sun still shining, and wake up between 5:30 and 6:30 the next morning to start the process all over again. Every day I hand wash my clothes and hang them out to dry on a clothes line. Hoping that there will be sufficent sun to evaporate all of the moisture before I need to take them down for fear that it might rain in the night. Occasionally the Albergue has a washing machine that isn´t too expensive and we pool our money and share it between three or four of us, to take a little pressure off of our hands, and utilize the spin cycle to get far more water out before putting them on the line.
To be completely honest the transient life that I am living right now is starting to play mind games with me. My body is not capable of walking more than 20 to 30 kilometers a day (or I would go much farther, just to occupy my body for longer each day) and when I roll into town between 1 and 2:30PM I have absolutely no desire to go out and explore the place. More or less I just want to take a shower, wash my clothes and go to sleep for a while.
I am starting to entertain fairly complex hypothetical situations while I am walking during the day. Sometimes about going to PCHUM on Sunday morning and watching all of the children play and run around the sanctuary. Going to lunch with the crew, swimming at the Tiptons, drinking coffee and talking with the Dueweke´s far to late in the night for Sue and Dave, jumping on their trampoline with the girls, continuing my laundry rounds until I have hit up everyone in the congregation for a free wash and dry, housesitting for Pam and Allan, "arguing" about capitalism vs. socialism and competition with Alan Freeman. Other times about working on my PHD at western and teaching and learning more and more math, and yet others about trying to get a job teaching highschool math in the Kalamazoo area. I find myself thinking about spending three months each summer in a different country, spending half of it in a language school and the other half traveling or walking around the country. I find myself wanting to learn more Spanish, to take every opportunity to speak it. I find myself thinking more about comparitive religion, and how interested in it I really am.
What does a person with equal interests in mathematics and comparative religion, with a passion of humanity, and a desire to live in a little town in southwest michigan look like? What does he do? How does he make his living? Will I still be thinking about this 530 kilometers from here, when the number of my steps nears 1,000,000????