After a very restful night in pamplona, Lydia and her crew were set to walk with me out of pamplona.  it is a lovely city and they did some shooting as i walked through the light rain that was falling.  no complaints there: the night before hail the size of gumballs came down for about 5 minutes!  i much prefer a light rain!  the shooting has been much less intrusive than i imagined, which is great.  most of the time i am on my own, and they are all such nice people to be around that when they are there, it is a lot of fun.  anyway, i was strolling more than walking and lydia asked me to consider how much i wanted to walk an whether or not i wanted to ride in the van with them.  generally speaking, they film me for  a while then ride ahead, set up a camera, film me again, etc.  i thought about it a lot and decided that i would accept a ride from them two times.  once in the interest of time, since the morning started late - we had all eaten dinner together at a dinner set up by the government of navarra and while i had to be in the albergue by 10, the others stayed there quite late, and mucho wine was consumed.  so they were an hour late to start, and i was walking slowly so i decided to accept a ride for a few kilometers just outside pamplona.  while i was in the car looking at the beautiful scenery, i felt sad to be so far from it.  then i got out and started walking through the fields, with some sort of medieval building in the distance, and teh tops of the hills covered by clouds.  it was so beautiful i just started crying from the beauty of it all.  they were there, so lydia asked me what was going on and i talked about how lucky i feel to be right where i am ( a good thing for me to remember, as i sit with my sore knees right now!)  next we walked through thick, thick, gooey, absolutely wonderful MUD!  they got a lot of great mud shots, and got covered with mud themselves.  next was the alto de perdons, a big, big, BIG hill, also mostly mud.  since it seems that one of my lessons on my camino is learning to ask for and accept help, i cut to the chase and asked for a ride down the alto de perdons.  at the bottom of the hill, i took off alone once more, this time for Eunate.  i´m going to make that it´s own entry, so that is all for now.  thank you to all of you who read this.  your comments are like water to me, and since i think about all of you so much as i am walking, i am glad you are with me here, too.
peace and blessings-
a