"OhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhHHHH SHIT!" Christina yelled as she jumped to the side and wrenched my backpack from behind.

Just a few seconds earlier we had been peacefully making our way down a dusty dirt road, flanked by waist knee-high grass that floated with the morning wind. The day had a grey beginning, but the sun was starting to poke through the clouds above the forest behind us.

It was our second day on the Camino de Santiago. We had arrived at our starting point from Paris two days earlier. Stepping off the TGV train at St. Jean Pied de Port was like stepping into a painting. Cream colored stucco houses with red tile roofs with clacking shatters framed the narrow cobblestone street which led us to the Acqueil de Saint Jacques and the Refugio where we would spend the night.

The Camino is a 1200 year old Catholic pilgrimage that has, for some reason, in the last 15 years, become the hottest tourist phenomenon in Europe. They estimate that this year, some 170,000 thousand people will walk at least part of the trail in an official capacity. Official means that at the place you begin, you register as a pilgrim with an organization sanctioned by the Catholic Church. You can start variously in Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, or even Moscow. Every Camino path ends leads the pilgrim (peregrino) to Santiago de Compostela, in the very northwest Part of Spain.

It is not hard to understand why the trail has become popular. It is hard to think of another trip that you could take where each day brings new food, new friends, mountains, valleys, mist on the horizon, checker-board farmland, cows by the side of the road, horses so close you could reach up and touch them, and over a thousand years of history and simultaneous kinetic experience that brings you into an irevocable and (as yet) unexplainable relationship with the millions of pilgrims of aeons past. All that for a few blisters and about 15 euro a day.

Anyway, it had been all verdant fields and sun soaked flowers for us until Christina yelled that second morning. As we descended down the little hill, we noticed a dog that began to, for lack of a better term freak out. The next moment, a farmer down at the bottom started yelling and waving a giant staff in the air.

All of a sudden, we were stuck in a sea of sheep.

Baas and Bleets joined in cacophonic concordance with the barking of sheep-dogs, the yell of the farmer, and the swearing that poured forth from Christina and I as we jumped to the side. We had not been off to the side for more than three seconds before the entire herd stampeded past in a furious panic.

Clomp clomp bark clomp clomp bark, the sounds receded into the distance. We had made it; we had survived our first major sheep attack.

But all was not well.

As Christina brushed herself off, I felt a sting on my leg, as if a bee or seven had just stung me all at the same time. I looked down to see yellow welts sprouting up from my calf.

The goddamn sheep had pushed me into a poisonous, stinging plant.

* * *

We have only been on the Camino for three days, yet already we have a hundred stories like this. It has been amazing so far, and promises to live up to our expectations. Tonight we are going to a Bar in Pamplona to watch the Spain-Greece futbol game and eat Tapas with our new German friend Robert. We might convince a few others to come along as well.

For now, Ultreya (onward and keep going)!