My Camino Day Introduction
It might be said that my Camino pilgrimage began in September 1998, when my wife, Janis, arrived home one day and asked, “How would you feel about hosting an exchange student?” Not wishing to seem instantly negative, I mumbled something about “not automatically being against it.” She responded “That’s good. He’ll be here in five minutes.”
And thus Carlos, his father Julian, his mother Mercedes, and his sister Carolina came into our lives. The list of magnificent things they brought with them is far too long to share, but it was that moment that led, seemingly inexorably, to an elderly atheist, me, becoming a true pilgrim on el Camino de Santiago.
It was a few years later, we were visiting Julian and Mercedes for a joint vacation in Spain, specifically in the North with stops in Oviedo and Santiago de Compostela. We visited the Santiago de Compostela Archcathedral Basilica and viewed the relics of Saint James, brother of Jesus, an event that was incomprehensible to me as a failed Lutheran and emerging atheist. We visited Oviedo, but my memory of that emphasizes the sidra and its pouring ritual with no notice of Oviedo’s role in the creation of the Camino.
But somewhere along the way I saw individuals and groups walking not far from the highway. One, in particular, struck me. He was mature, possibly in his 30s, slender, perhaps slightly taller than medium height, and striding along in a purposeful and confident manner that impressed me deeply.
In a very real way, I wanted to be him at that moment.
My curiosity aroused, I asked Julian what was going on and he responded that these people were pilgrims on El Camino de Santiago. He may have explained that this was a pilgrimage route then or a bit later as we saw scallop shell symbols during our visit. Julian seemed a bit disapproving when I made light of the fact that we had done a portion of the pilgrimage when we walked from our hotel to our restaurant of choice one evening.
Memory plays tricks, and all that is from memory.
My memory, and collection of photos, fails me at that point and I have no idea when that visit occurred other than that it was in the aughts. Our first visit to Spain was in 2000, we stayed with Julian and Mercedes near Madrid and visited Toledo and Segovia that summer, so it was not 2000. In 2003, we traveled south and visited the Alhambra, ditto. In 2007, we spent time in Barcelona in Spain’s northeast corner, ditto again.
As time passed, the image of that hiker and the tiny bits that Julian had told me grew and transformed themselves from idle curiosity into interest into investigation into what might best be called passion. The occasional “google” became frequent. The rabbit holes of Camino stories and equipment descriptions and hiking and camping instructions became deeper and deeper.
By 2017, I had determined that at least sampling the Camino was important enough to me to begin serious planning and training. In 2018, my pilgrimage began in earnest on August 3rd when I crossed the Puente de Santiago from Hendaye, France, to Irún, Spain. While my journey was interrupted by injury in 2019 and COVID in 2020, it has since continued from Zumaia to Barreda in 2021 and from Barreda to Cadavedo in 2022 as shown in this map.
This section of an elderly peregrino’s (pilgrim’s) website is that story, the story of my journey along The Path from the Puente de Santiago until today.
These “war stories” will be created “as the spirit moves” and as time allows, both in number and in sequence. Thus far, creating them cannot be described as “work.” Creating the few “My Camino Day” posts that I’ve done thus far has a common problem: The rabbit holes are very deep. Choosing just the right photo from my collection can take far too long. If that photo does not exist, finding someone else’s work on the Internet can take far longer. Why? Because seeing every one of those photos brings back warm and wonderful memories of physical accomplishment, intellectual growth, and spiritual renewal.
Welcome aboard! I hope you will enjoy reading and listening to these stories as much as I have enjoyed creating them.
