My bunk-room mates settled the issue for me this morning in Belorado: Should I get up early for the 18 mile walk to Ages or start late and cope with the afternoon sun?

The rustling and zipping of bags, dropping of electronics in the dark, scurrying to the bathroom, the burst of red light from headlamps — it all began before 5 a.m.

That’s ok. I wasn’t sleeping much anyway.

The route to Ages is long and a huge amount of it is uphill, steeply uphill. A lot of it is also through pine and oak forest.

Why was everyone up so early? I think the full moon had something to do with it.

Simply spectacular.

And we were walking directly toward it. Every hill, every stand of trees, every turn in the path, every village provided fresh framing as the moon descended, growing larger and paler as the sun rose in the east.

What a morning!

Harvest moon before us and a technicolor sunrise behind.

A few people generously observed that we should enjoy a second full moon on this 500-mile journey just as we are reaching Santiago de Compostela.

Besides the challenging topography, the Camino gave us numerous small villages today, and you know what that means.

Cafés! Coffee! Tortillas! Croissants! Friends!

So many of them were open at 7 a.m. which is good news for we who had been trudging along on empty stomachs and low caffeine since 6 a.m.

At my second caffeine break, a couple of my favorite Camino people, Debbie and Jose, were just walking downstairs to begin their day’s walk.

We have a way of bumping into each other every other day or so.

I ran into two of my angels today, Kadi and Lori. They helped me enormously when my knee was causing me great pain early on.

There are about a dozen people I can now say that I enjoy encountering off and on.

Speaking of encounters, after I checked into my auberge in tiny Ages, I dropped downstairs for a refreshing drink.

Mark Hoborn, a fellow San Diegan, had the same idea, though he had a few more miles to go for the day. it turn out, his cousin is married to one of my former editors at the San Diego Union-Tribune, Jim Chute.

File it under Just One Of Those Camino Things. Seems to happen a lot — connections.

My friend Lori’s husband Gordon was telling me earlier that he met an old friend this morning on the Camino that he has not seen in decades.

She was a Member of Parliament and he was in the Royal Guard in London.

See? Connections. They are everywhere on the Camino. You just have to open yourself up to the possibilities.

Buen Camino!