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Think I’ve caught the Laura bug. Had a restless night with a very sore throat! Plus I’ve either been bitten by more bed bugs or the old ones are flaring up & I had/have more bites than I knew!The Michael lights in the bathroom keep going off & I’m constantly having to wave my hands around! There is NO toilet paper in ANY of the bathrooms. Luckily I wake up at 2 to go to the loo & a young kid from last night is still up brushing his teeth 😱and he gets me the remnants of one from the boys bathroom! It is just barely enough for me in the morning when I desperately need it! The other women are frantically scurrying for tp. I look in some drawers beside the register & find a boxful of sheets & pillow covers that the bastard Hospitalero has NOT given any of us. There are fresh bed bug bites on my right leg.Someone has finished all of Laura’s curry and left the pan unwashed. The new rice is still in the pot – half eaten. Aya is up & she tells me that the friends didn’t show up last night but she’ll take care of the cleaning up & NOT waste the rice.Hideki asks if I’m ready to leave & if he can join me. I say “yes of course” & we set off at 7:40. We walk together for an hour or so & it turns out he is a retired English teacher (which he doesn’t want to tell me).On the way I have a potential scary incidence (or potential bloated imagination) – a major part of the way into … is on the highway and a car approaching from the opposite direction pulls over to the side of one of the hundreds of cornfields lining the roads. For some reason I stop immediately (I’m about 100 feet away) & try to reach for the loudest whistle in the world which with annoying regularity I forget to hang around my neck in the mornings. However with my backpack cinching my pockets in a vice grip I cannot reach it. I glance behind me and I don’t see any other pilgrims. The road is not super busy but certainly has enough traffic to make it seem not so isolated and creepy – but no other car has passed in either direction for about 5 minutes now. I walk on a few feet more trying to see how many people are in the car & whether anyone is getting out to get something from the trunk or reaching out to the back seat but there’s no discernible activity! I stop again – this time removing my mochila & placing it on a shell sign (in case I have to make a dash for it) & now having easy access to my whistle take it out & hang it around my neck! I strap my mochila back on again taking it slow & easy & keeping a careful watch on the car. Just as I start walking hesitantly again the car gets back on the road again and as it drives past me I glimpse just the driver & no one else. The impression I get as it goes by swiftly is that of an of a pleasant faced man! I heave a sigh of relief & wonder idly if he’s driven away because he sees my whistle from the distance or whether he had stopped to make an important phone call when I sense someone behind me and before I can react or be startled he passes me by with a “buen camino”. It’s a fellow pilgrim who has apparently appeared out of nowhere and I wonder uneasily if that’s why the car drove off – because the driver saw the pilgrim before I did. This was the only time on the entire Camino that I felt threatened and I will never know if I had absolutely no reason to feel so!See email to B for more details.​