Today’s pictures can be viewed here. Today’s prayer intentions: For Vincent Vū Huy our parish seminarian on his birthday. We also pray for all seminarians and for an increase of vocations to the priesthood.

Wednesday October 18th, feast of St Luke.

Today We Begin by raising our walking sticks to salute our seminarian Vincent Vū Huy on his birthday! He is studying to become a priest in the diocese of Orlando and we are so happy to know him and so proud of his call to the vocation of priesthood.

At the end of the day yesterday we decided to take a taxi ahead to the city of Sahagún. And so this morning we took a taxi back to where we left off and were able to walk today’s journey without our backpacks. It was a beautiful day with great temperatures and a lot of wind which meant very few flies and gnats!

We saw what looked like a maze in a field and were tempted to go have some fun. But we stayed on the path and only stopped to enjoy the approved rest stops!

Occasionally along the Camino we come across a memorial to a pilgrim who died in previous years. It’s always a good reminder to stop and pray for the souls of those faithful departed.

Along the way I’ve seen what appears to be a home built into a berm of the land. We learned today that no, these are not homes for hobbits. They are called bodegas. We read some of the history that these date back to 2,000 years ago during Roman times. People would use these as store houses for the winter to keep wine, grain, and meats. This particular Bodega has also now been turned into a local restaurant bar.

A pretty cool part of the day was reaching the official halfway point across the country of Spain. This does not account for those of us who started from France. So the first picture next to the mile marker showing 383km to Santiago was really our official halfway point. But it’s pretty awesome to see these two statues they made. The one on the left is Saint Benedict holding the inscription “Ora et labora” which is Latin for “pray and work”. In our case, pray and walk!!

Before we are tempted to say that today was totally easy being able to walk without our backpacks in such beautiful weather, as we were getting to our final destination we had a sudden windstorm. It was still beautiful out but we were walking against the wind with gusts up to 20 miles an hour. There always has to be at least a little challenge on the Camino! (But this challenge was fun and made us laugh!)

The joy of today’s walk is appropriate as we pray for Vincent and all of our seminarians. We pray that they also find that joy of following Jesus to become servants of God’s people….priests in his church. May they always know the joy and love of Christ and have the wind (of the Holy Spirit) at their backs to help push them along.

Buen Camino 🙏❤️

Today’s pictures can be viewed here. Today’s prayer intentions: For Vincent Vū Huy our parish seminarian on his birthday. We also pray for all seminarians and for an increase of vocations to the priesthood.