“Where are youz guiz from?” At first Dex’s accent was distracting, the tongue stud wasn’t helping.  The tables in the center piazza were tightly arranged.  Dex and Ricky, both English, one from New Castle the other 10Km outside Canterbury.  The two men met several years earlier and became buddies for an annual guy’s trip, their wives were not interested in hiking or walking.  

“Dexter”, as he introduced himself, “Dex” to his friends had been married twice.  Removing his wedding ring and reveling a skull tattoo he explained the skull was a modification to his first wife’s name “Maggy”.  Learning from this experience he has a plan should his marriage to Lisa fail. Pointing to the large letters LISA around his ankle he explained that an easy alteration would be “At LISA I tried.”

The duo are walking from Porto to Santiago, “money and time are tight.”  We all agreed that long journeys were a great luxury of many different resources. Although they had been on the path a relative short period of time, they were enjoying a kind of celebrity status. Many people were stopping by their table, sharing stories, their names were shouted across the square. Updates were exchanged on injuries, including sharing and comparing photos of blisters. The spectacle was a version of the bar scene from Indiana Jones.

As the crowd of fans thinned it was Ricky’s turn to share his story.  Working as a circus clown he had fallen in love with a Venezuelan woman, “we were just kids.”  “She didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Spanish, so it took some time, you know.” Her entire extended family were a traveling circus, literally. An uncle was a tight rope walker, her parents were on the trapeze, and she juggled. After several years they married and settled for a more traditional life.

By the end of dinner, their 3 pitchers of Sangria and our bottle of wine consumed, they were man crushing hard on Edward.  At one point when Edward briefly left the table Dex leaned in close, as though sharing a secret, “Edward seems to be really opening up to us.”