Day 37

Day 37 – Post Camino Randomness

Today I am traveling from Santiago to Madrid and tomorrow will fly back to the states. I have loved my time abroard, but I am ready to get back home. When I exited the original train station in Bayonne France, many days ago, I was able to tell the pilgrims from the fresh faced wide-eyed backpack carrying newbies to the world of cross country hiking. I was one of those! Today, this train station doesn’t have as many, but it does have some weary looking, comfortable travelers carrying those same backpacks. I am one of those.

In visiting with various pilgrims, the first thing everyone said they were going to do was eat a meal of spicy food. While the food was good in Spain, it was not spiced and mostly bland. They grow great vegetables and fruit and use olive oil to cook, but they don’t know how to use seaoning. I will have to agree with that sentiment, except I would like a little meat on the bone too. In speaking of food, the other thing I missed was wheat bread, all the bread was white bread and it all had a hard crust. Some like a hard crust, I don’t really like the hard crust. We decided it would be impossible to follow any dietary restrictions on this Camino, way too many starches and carbs. They served french fries as a plate filler on almost every meal. As a diabetic, I actually had to feed myself extra due to the exercise of walking that much every day, it will be interesting to see what my blood work looks like next time I go to the doctor.

On communal living, the biggest complaint was not the snoring, we all had several great after dinner conversations on the snorers and their harmony, or lack of it. The greatest complaint was the use of the microfiber towels and how it was basically drying off with a chamois. They are good to absorb water and dry quickly. The problem is we are all used to a nice fresh smelling and soft towel, so effectively using a chamois to dry off leaves one questioning whether you are really dry or not. Try it sometime and if you have 24 inch by 24 inch shower or box, try using the microfiber towel in there. The towels are great for getting the first batch of rinse water from hand washed clothes, you know of we all have hand squeezed the excess water out of rinsed clothes, but squeezing them in the towel soaks up a ton of the excess water and allows clothes to hang dry faster.

What infections, diseases or insect attacks do I have after so many days of this style of living. First, I am amazed I don’t have athlete’s foot. You would think with 20 or 30 to a shower, someone would be spreading something. I have no other infections or diseases either. My gastronomical system worked good and life was great. Insects were no problem, other than those darn flies. A few people got a spider bite or two, but I was lucky! Bedbugs were none existent, the hostels have apparently done a good job of getting them cleaned up and gone.

We all loved the small villages and the caring that all had for the pilgrims that came through their town. In many of the small towns, the services to the walking pilgrims were the lifeblood that keeps the town alive. The smallest town I stayed in had a population of 13, the smallest hamlet I passed through had a population of 4. I really enjoyed being in the rural areas, even the early morning rooster crowing was not annoying. You would never see those sites, smell those smells or hear those sounds on a bus or car tour of a foreign country, or even our country. Traveling by 2 feet is definitely a unique way to see a country. I bet none of us would have the patience to do much more than a month, which I did on his trip.

The big towns were a mixed blessing. To enter a larger town, you usually had to walk through 6k to 8k of industrial areas or lower class suburbs to get into the city and then, there was some walk through the “newer” parts of the city to get into the old town area, where the Church always was and where the path always passed and the services for pilgrims were located. Then the next morning there was the walk to exit the town. I must say that the big city people were also very nice to pilgrims. In one large town, I was walking in the newer downtown area with another pilgrim, we were standing close to a very busy round about looking and feeling lost. A car braked hard, stopped, the driver stopped all the traffic behind him, got out and pointed us in the right direction. That is caring for pilgrims.

I have talked many times about the community of pilgrims and it truly is one. It is hard to believe that there are groups just like the ones I saw yesterday traveling this Camino on a daily basis. The day after I originally left St. Jean, another group started, as did one 2 days later. Today, some in those groups trekked into Santiago and went to another pilgrim mass in the Catholic Church. Tomorrow, they will come to the airport and train station to start their journey home. This cycle goes on pretty much year round, but is more active from March through October, perhaps 240 groups or more a year that develop their community. That is the wonder of this shared journey.

I have been asked if there were any embarrassing moments or comments. One thing we all got a laugh with one night during an after dinner discussion was a nice lady named Stacy looked around after we had taken a group picture and said, how am I going to explain to my boyfriend that I have slept with every man at this dinner table, most multiple nights. That is the fun part of the community, we laugh at the dumb jokes and the communal situation. It was amazing, there were probably no more than 2 or 3 people that did not respect everyone else’s space or dress decorum. I had one older guy who always stripped to what looked liked speedo shorts every night by his bed before crawling under the covers, he could have saved everyone a lot of strained necks from turning away if he had just slept in tomorrow’s hiking shorts! It really is amazing how well everyone respected the other people and dressed appropriately at all times. I did mention the French couple who ended up in the same bed one morning. I also had one German married couple that got a little amorous one day in a really nice hostel’s handicap bathroom (the only handicap bathroom I saw on the trip). The owner was checking two others and myself in and showing us the facilities, well, the Germans forgot to lock the door, thank goodness for shower steam.

Two sore feet and plenty of sore toes still wanting to go forward

Ecclesiastes 8:15

continue to day 38