Yesterday Ellen and Itook a bus down to Porto, Portugal and booked in to a hotel right next to the airport. We stayed cooped up all afternoon, doing all the researching and booking for the next few days travel, eating through all of the stockpiled food that wouldn’t make it on the plane, and napping. We ventured out last night for a beer and chicken empanadas on a patio.

This morning we woke up early and walked to the airport for my RyanAir flight to Hamburg. I was worried about the size of my pack (RyanAir is known for having cheap flights but making their money on baggage and other crazy fees) but no one gave it a second look. I’m sure it helped that Ellen is again sloughing some of my more bulky stuff around until I see her again in 2 weeks. She’s off to southern Germany to visit old friends. I’m off to Hamburg because that was the most northern place I could get for cheap, planning to bus/train up to Sweden in the coming days.

If you’ve never flown RyanAir before like I hadn’t, let me describe it for you. There are no seat assignments. They just open the doors, everyone loads on and finds a seat. Except for this one obnoxious guy who kept pushing me from behind it was a surprisingly civilized scene, perhaps even better than those terribly frustrating moments when they do try to call people in some order and everyone rushes to the front anyway. Take off was smooth and I was dozing off when the advertising started. Pre-recorded offers over the loudspeaker for food, perfume, smokeless cigarettes you can use on the plane, phone cards, etc etc. About every 20 minutes they’d offer something and then the flight attendants would come through hawking it. No complimentary beverage service. Not even a seat front pocket. A very interesting flight.

All this considered it was smooth going until I heard the pilot say, “Looks like we’ll be having smooth skies on to Brussels, then over Hamburg and to Lubeck.” Wait, WHAT? OVER Hamburg? I got out my ticket, remembering Ellen saying this morning that RyanAir often flies into weird small airports. Sure enough, I bought a ticket to “Hamburg-Lubeck,” which apparently is not in Hamburg. Oops!!

According to my offline map (I very highly recommend the PocketEarth app for all travelers) Lubeck is about 60 km north of Hamburg. When we landed I was steeling myself to cab to the train station and hopefully catch a commuter rail south but as it turned out, most people who get this flight also want to be in Hamburg, not Lubeck, so the lady at the information booth directed me to a bus waiting outside to take us all to the main station in Hamburg. Phew! Pretty funny, and lesson learned.

My first meal in Germany was a pastry and a coffee. Pretty typical! I burned some time at a cafe waiting until check-in time and I’m now in an odd hostel, about to take a nap. I never thought I would miss the albergues on the Camino but I already do. No familiar faces here.

Ever since leaving my last Camino friend on the bus yesterday I’ve been thinking back to some of my favorite moments on the trail: the evening in Ages when a big bunch of us all hung out for the first time and we moved all of the bar’s tables to the other side of the road to chase the sunshine, the day I walked by myself in the mountains, the day I was exhausted and hot and sunburned and Mark and James sat me down with a plate of food as soon as I arrived at the albergue, the communal dinner when we had to sing to get our potatoes from the baker, the first time I heard a cuckoo, the first night I shared a cigar with Jonathan and a wonderful group of Irish who were singing folk songs from a book that they carried with them, the morning I got up early and walked up to a hermitage I was too tired to visit the night before, my experience at the Iron Cross, the cathedral in Auch with Diana, walking through wine fields on the plateau watching a falcon hunting and listening to Edith Piaf…

Such beautiful times. And they keep popping in my head. That is what I need to hold on to.