My Camino Day 2019 and 2020 – the lost years
My Camino Day the lost years is, well, it’s a long story. In a sense, it began before My Camino Day 8/18 2018 came to an end at the Zumaia train station because it was already clear to me that I would continue my Camino Journey; that I would return to Zumaia and continue it from the place where it had ended too soon.
Memory plays tricks, but my memory says that, sitting on the train that would take me back to San Sebastian, it was obvious I would put what I had learned to use, train and equip myself for a far more extensive part of my Journey, and return to hike el Camino in earnest in 2019.
It was not to be. Two years would be lost before my Camino Journey could continue.
My Camino Day 2019 – a lost year
A verbal altercation during a 2019 training hike ended in shocking fashion when the other man involved – four inches taller, 40 pounds heavier, and 20 years younger than I – chose to strike me. He knocked me to the ground. Falling straight back, I landed on my backpack with its ballast of a bag of rice. Whether that saved me more serious injury such as a concussion, completed the rupture one of my lumbar disks, neither, or both is unknowable. I was stunned but functional. A trip to the hospital seemed excessive at that moment, given my injuries as I believed them to be.
That was a mistake.
In any event, my occasional back problems quickly became significantly worse. Chiropractic care was no longer effective, which led to a recommendation that I visit a neurosurgeon. While surgery was ultimately deemed unnecessary, it quickly became clear that my body would not be able to succeed on the Camino in 2019.
My Camino Day 2020 – a lost year
As 2019 came to a much appreciated end, I revised my Camino plans. First, I would address my back injury through pain management, second, I would return to my training, and third, I would return to hike el Camino in earnest in 2020.
It was not to be.
The COVID pandemic imposed restrictions on our lives that were unique in my experience. The world seemed to simply come, almost, to a stop.
Memory plays tricks. My memories of the summer and fall of 2020 are of staying home most of the time, wearing a mask whenever I was in the presence of others, working remotely, focusing my training on walking outside and exercising in our home gym, and urging the slow progress against the COVID virus to move more quickly. As time passed, and the worst of the pandemic’s disruptions to society eased ever so slowly, I began to consider a possible return to el Camino in 2021.
The 2021 Plan
Just as my dream of a return to The Way was forming in late 2020, our great friends in Spain announced they were planning a grand celebration in September. From this, a plan was born.
The plan was a grand one, a complex trip to Spain that would last about two months! It would begin with our younger son and his younger son joining me for a two week introduction to the wonders of Spain. From there, it would be back to Zumaia for a two week return to el Camino de Santiago del Norte. Then to Madrid to meet up with my wife and rest a bit with our friends to make ready for !THE FIESTA! After the celebration, a few day’s rest would be followed by a joint vacation somewhere in Spain.
Planning began with laying out the weeks in Spain, evaluating all the activities, and coordinating the whole thing with friends and family. As days passed, the planning grew intense with airline tickets purchased and Airbnb reservations made. A new backpack, a silk sleeping bag liner, a tiny stove able to heat water for coffee or dried food, and a variety of other lightweight, but potentially important gear was ordered and arrived at the house.
The vacation of a lifetime, an amazing claim, given the vacations we have shared with our Spanish friends, was fast approaching!
It was not to be.
The reality
The troubles began with unforeseen events ending the planned September celebration. This was, for all of us, a bitter pill, incredibly bitter for our friends.
Suddenly, the centerpiece of the plan was in disarray; the two month schedule now included a smoking crater where a week of happy fellowship and joy had been. Everyone was in shock.
As days passed, the fallout from the fiesta’s cancellation began to appear, especially for our Spanish friends. We all began reevaluating the several weeks we were to be with them because because their hearts simply were elsewhere. We began reevaluating the plan for the September part of the trip. And accepting the idea that we would have little or no opportunity to spend time with our friends as they worked to move forward with their lives.
Then …
Travel to Spain requires a valid passport. Our grandson’s passport had expired and he had applied for a replacement. In the COVID addled days of the spring and early summer of 2021, however, normal passport processing times expanded and expanded and expanded. And our grandson’s passport did not arrive as expected.
Memory plays tricks. Despite using every approach we could think of, including begging for help from our respective congressional delegations, it became clear that the passport could not be accelerated, or even found in the system. As the day for our departure grew close, we were forced to accept the fact that the lack of the passport made most of the logistics of our travel plans unworkable.
COVID restrictions seemed to be rising once again, with testing requirements and travel not recommended. Our Spanish friends began describing growing COVID problems in Spain and expressing doubts about the wisdom of the trip. Even making the trip if the passport was in hand seemed unwise.
We talked about many options. My son was willing to go without his son, but preferred not to; I felt the same about both of them. Thus, though we waited until the last possible day before departure to cancel flights, I was forced to accept a detestable reality, and slowly began my journey through the stages of grief and the loss of a third year in my Camino Journey.
¡[Expletive Deleted] It!
My wonderful wife saw my pain and decided to comfort me. She searched the Internet for alternative activities and found a lot of advice from many websites suggesting training regimens that she chose to share in a “this will all work out” approach that focused on “next year.”
Memory plays tricks. A careful examination of our emails of late July, 2021 proves to me that the photograph on the right, which appears on the Follow the Camino website, is the one I stared at as I worked to accept the reality that my Camino Journey would wait another year. It is not the photograph of memory, that one is, again, a young woman, but she is wearing rain gear and seems to be pirouetting with her arms upraised in joy, her smile transcendent. My memory insists that the evidence provided by my computer is wrong.
It matters not. Staring at the picture, recognizing that the remainder of the grand plan lay in ruins, I quietly spoke the words my spirit demanded of me. “[Expletive Deleted] it! I’m going.”
With no plan in place beyond making Airbnb reservations in Madrid and Zumaia, making my way to Zumaia as best I could by train, and figuring the rest of it out when the day arrived to recommence my Camino Journey, I boarded my flight to Spain as planned.
The story of the next few days is worth telling on its own, a post for another day. A link will be added when it goes live.
¡Hasta pronto!
