Today was hard. Emotionally. I threw my walking sticks to the ground and then my backpack and sat in the gravel and said I’m done with this. We are just walking every day, why? This is our honeymoon? We had reserved beds at a private albergue in Ribadiso so we started late (9:20am) & took 2 hours for lunch in Melide, because there was no rush to get a bed like usual. So it was 3pm and we were still 11km (almost 7 miles) from the albergue and I was so tired and my muscle or something in the back of my knee hurt and I didn’t want to walk anymore. Sofia and I had been walking separately most of the day, seeing what it was like to walk the Camino “solo,” even if it was only for a couple hours. So I was all alone when I threw my sticks to the ground and gave up, even though I knew that in only a few minutes Sofia would be approaching and I would tell her I was giving up and we would talk it through and I would get up again and we would walk to the albergue and it would serve as a metaphor for our marriage, that some days we would feel like giving up and it would be hard but we would work through it and keep moving forward. But, it felt damn good to throw those sticks down and say “no more!” Even though I was on a gravelly country road and I would either have to walk back or walk forward to “give up” and I knew I wasn’t really. And here we are in Ribadiso, drinking wine and laughing with our friend Martha from Atlanta about how hard our day was and life goes on. Tomorrow, we walk. 
