Marz is coming home!

Aw, geez--I missed Marz calling from Spain! I'm almost never without my phone, but I left it at home this morning when I went to coffee with bink & Alice. . . and when I came home I'd missed Marz calling (on a borrowed phone) from Santiago.
Argh!

Drawings toward the end of my 2001 Camino sketchbook: figs and coffee:

I'm so sorry to have missed the calls. She left a voice mail though, saying she feels done, and she doesn't want to walk anymore (she'd thought she might walk to the ocean, after finishing the pilgrimage proper), so she's coming home early--this weekend instead of next.
Yay, I'm super excited to see her! And she'll have missed our heat wave, which wasn't so bad after all. (This afternoon's the hottest--"only" 97ºF /36ºC here at 2 PM, and a cool front in a few hours is supposed to drop the heat 10 degrees.)

I had gotten one postcard from Marz, dated July 4. It took three weeks to arrive. She'd written from a tiny town out of a spaghetti Western-- where a local  had invited a pilgrim/priest to hold Mass in his backyard, . . . attended by four mangy cats.
Very Camino.

Oh--nice... I just now got a call from the phone-owner (I'd called the number and left a message).
I'd thought it was a the phone of a fellow pilgrim, in which case they might never see Marz again, but Kelly, the very nice woman who called me back, is a volunteer at a place for English-speaking Catholic pilgrims to gather in Santiago--for tea and talk and Mass in English--and she said she'll see Marz again and pass along a message.

***Give me your flight info, Marz, so I can meet you!

Kelly said Marz is great, and she looks great, and she walked Camino in 28 days, record time. BIG SMILE
Hm--that means she got to Santiago in time for the Feast Day of St. James ("Santiago")--neat!

Gee. It's so long that Marz's been gone... Camino takes FOR   EVER, and then in a flash--poof! it's done.
That can be a hard stop. I wish there'd been this place to gather and reflect in Santiago when I walked. (It started in 2014.)

The very last drawings in my 2001 sketchbook: a dog at the Catedral de Santiago, and the contour of the cathedral's spire: