Escape from Purgatory

The last couple days have tested our mettle.
Yesterday we walked an additional 3km to make up for an early stopping point the day before. Everything was going well -- cute little towns, wine fountain, helpful old man, a lunch/ice cream shop in Villamayor. Mariela, at age 13 the second-youngest member of our group, sprained her ankle, so she and her parents went ahead to Los Arcos via taxi. The rest of us set out for the final 12km, which the guidebook assured us would be isolated and without water pumps but would offer "glorious" landscapes of vineyards, pine trees, and olive orchards.
My group of six brought up the caboose, and somewhere along what felt like the same stretch of road repeated over and over again, we lost it. First came the laugh attack. Then, the improvisation of eulogies for group members. Finally, we approached a crossroads, with the familiar blue Camino road sign with the yellow shell, which we assumed would be our salvation, assuring us that Los Arcos was just over the next hill. With an involuntary moan of betrayal, we looked up to discover there were still 5.7 km left.
That's when things started getting weird.For a minute, it seemed like everyone was going to go all "Lord of the Flies." Instead, we became six-year-olds. We did yoga, lay down in the vineyard, ran through the vineyard, made bad jokes, and finally decided we were in Purgatory.
A man we later learned was from Liverpool passed us on the road and talked with us.With each "and me day," "and me wife," "and me walking pole," we began to believe he was a mirage. As he wandered off into the distance, the good Gabriela demanded we all put on bandanas and inducted us as The Paisley Gang, a gaggle bandits breaking out of Purgatory. We had call signs (nicknames a la "Battlestar Galactica") like Time Bomb, The Bald Eagle, and Little Momma, and we developed a mythology of how we had escaped and who we were and where we were going. Eventually we devolved into shouting camp songs and German hymns. And then suddenly there we were, singing "Que Sera" as we descended gently for the last time into the arms of the good souls who had come to meet us.

We've walked for one week now, and the pretenses and polishing we've kept up are finally fading. We're messy, tired, tense, and we don't always like each other. We're more than a little jealous of the Swedish Lutheran teen church group going home tomorrow. But the saying goes: The Camino doesn't give you what you want, it gives you what you need. As for me, salvation was this evening: four friends with faces aglow, running towards me and holding my lost hiking boot.