Distance traveled: 28.1 km

This was one of my favorite days on the Camino!

We knew that we had a longer day ahead of us, so we set off from Nájera in the dark. Once again, we got a real treat as the sun rose!

Agnes, Adam, and I took a quick bathroom and coffee break in the next town we came to, and a man I’d noticed the night before while walking around town turned up there too. He was wearing what I recognized as a Split Hajduk soccer jersey, so I approached him and said “Hrvatski?” His face lit up, and he started speaking excitedly in Croatian. I had to stop him and say “na govorim hrvatski” – I don’t speak Croatian. I do, however, speak enough to be able to explain that my mother’s family is originally from Croatia, and we were able to get by for about a minute as he asked from which town and I explained. This man and I had no languages in common other than my few words of Croatian, but thankfully, he turned out to be traveling with some other people who did speak English, so we ended up being able to communicate more. He was utterly tickled to find someone else Croatian on the Camino, and I got him to tell me how to say “Buen Camino!” in Croatian. (I think you just say “have a good trip!”)

A while after we left this town, we came upon a strange ghost town. That phrase “ghost town” likely conjures an image of something built long ago and abandoned, but this was was strange because it was built recently! Apparently, the government had hoped to lure young people back from the big cities by constructing a new community here, but no one had been tempted, so there is just a large cluster of buildings standing wholly uninhabited! There is, however, an adjacent golf course that serves both regional residents as well as the pilgrims passing by. We took another break there, and that’s where I met Mark, my second lawyer of the Camino. I was excited to meet him because he is also from the San Francisco area, and I thought he might be a good source for connections once I arrived and needed to find a job. Mark told us he was heading for Grañón that night, and that was our tentative goal as well.

We arrived around lunchtime in Santo Domingo de la Calzada, which is the guide-suggested stopping point for those coming from Nájera. Adam, Agnes, and I got lunch together and then, sadly, said good-bye to Agnes. She knew that it would be better for her to stop there rather than push herself too hard in order to get to Grañón, and we couldn’t argue with that. The rest of our group would see Agnes again, but I never did. (I’m sure I will again in the future!) She was such a pleasure to walk with and made me laugh often.

Kim and I had sent our backpacks to the albergue where Agnes was going to stay, but since we felt like continuing on to Grañón, we picked them up and carried them with us for the first time in five days. I was amazed at how good it felt to have 25 pounds of weight on my back again! Now that I had Tevas and my blisters had started to heal a bit, my feet could handle the extra pressure, and I never went without my backpack again!

Our main reason for pushing on to Grañón was our desire to have a more classic pilgrim experience: sleeping in a church! (I loved telling my mother in my daily check-in message that I’d be sleeping on the floor of a church that night.) The church of San Juan la Bautista houses pilgrims in a few rooms adjacent to the sanctuary and offers a communal dinner that everyone prepares together. We claimed mats in the main room and then joined a small group of pilgrims already enjoying drinks in front of a nearby pub. We found Mark again and met his sister Becky as well as a guy named Javier from Seattle and a woman named Judy from Canada. I’d spend a lot more time with Mark, Becky, and Javier in the coming weeks.

After a couple glasses of Rioja outside, we returned to the church, and I attended my first mass in a long time. (Most of the people staying there chose to attend, regardless of whether or not they were Catholic.) The mass took place in Spanish, which I could understand, but I think even the people who couldn’t speak Spanish still enjoyed it. The priest closed the celebration with a pilgrim blessing that we’d encounter a few more times along our journey.

I had forgotten that in Spanish, which has both formal and informal forms of address, God is addressed using the informal tú rather than the formal usted. (In contrast, in French and I think also in Italian, God is addressed formally, similar to how in English we tend to capitalize “Him” when writing about God or Jesus.) I’m both a linguistics nerd and someone who spent quite a bit of time in college studying the role of the Catholic Church in Spain, so I wanted to find out more about the reason for this distinction (not used in other Spanish-speaking countries). The priest ended up joining us for dinner, so I approached him afterwards to ask about this. He told me something like: “God is supposed to be accessible. He’s not far away from us; he’s always with us. We consciously chose to use the tú form when addressing God because we didn’t want to create a false separation between Him and us.” I liked that a lot!

Back inside the albergue part of the church, everyone helped to get dinner ready. My job ended up being slicing chorizo! The meal was simple but satisfying, in part because we’d all contributed to it. We had pasta, chorizo, salad, bread, and more wine. One of the men sitting near me was an object of fascination for many of us – he is essentially a professional pilgrim. Although he’s originally French, he spoke accentless Spanish, which he learned purely from all the time he has spent walking back and forth across his Spain. He was walking with his daughter (who was back at their campsite), who was now a young adult but had been accompanying him literally since she could walk. Can you imagine?!

After we all helped to clean up dinner, a smaller number of us gathered in the choir loft of the sanctuary for an evening prayer service of sorts. We sat in a circle, and the main activity was going around in a circle and introducing ourselves and our reasons for walking or reflections from our journey so far. It was so interesting to hear from this diverse group of people, many of whom I hadn’t seen before today. We had people walking during a time of great transition in their lives (like me), people celebrating recovery from cancer, people recovering from loss, people who’d hit rock bottom and couldn’t think of another option, people seeking greater connections with their fellow man… more than a few people teared up as they spoke. It was clear that everyone recognized how transformative this experience had already been for them. We ended the service by going around again and giving the person next to us a blessing. I surprised the Spanish woman next to me by giving it to her in Spanish. 🙂

I highly recommend staying in Grañón to anyone who may do the Camino in the future. It wasn’t as uncomfortable as you might think to sleep on mats on the floor, and the mass, dinner, and prayer service were really moving and memorable.