Distance traveled: 23.7 km

Happily, I awoke on this day to find that it was not raining – though clouds still threatened a passing shower or two in the course of the morning.

Adam, Mark, and I met for breakfast and then set off together on the path out of town. Here, too, there are two possible routes to take – one involves a steep and potentially treacherous hike through the hills; the other involves walking on the side of the road for a while. We all chose the latter!

(Interestingly, I just finished reading a book by a pilgrim who walked in the early 2000’s, and his account of this stretch on the road makes it sound incredibly dangerous. Things must have changed since then, though it’s hard to imagine that the road now could look that different. His account describes many near-misses with large trucks; perhaps because I was walking this on a Sunday, there wasn’t much traffic.)

I really hit my stride once we got out of town and had soon lost sight of Adam and Mark behind me. Perhaps the lack of rain added an extra spring to my step! I found myself in a good mood for no reason whatsoever and, for the first time, decided to listen to music. Rather than blocking out the world around me, my intention was to consciously form an association between this stretch of the Camino and a handful of songs on a playlist I made as I walked – I called it “Camino Autumn Appreciation”.

After several hours on the road (and a brief interlude through some forest, where I sung out loud for a bit before encountering an Italian man who was also singing, more beautifully), we finally left the main highway and returned to a more typical Camino footpath that led us through a couple of small towns. One in particular had quite a lot of cows, and I thought this scene of napping calves was adorable:

I knew that I had a hard final hour ahead of me when I got to the town of Las Herrerías, where these cows were. From there, it’s a nearly three kilometer climb up to La Faba, where I’d decided I was likely to stay for the night. (My friends Lou and Bill, now almost two days ahead of me, had relayed that they’d had a very pleasant stay at the German-run albergue there.) It seemed a good place to break up the climb to O Cebreiro. Although the Iron Cross is technically the highest point on the Camino, O Cebreiro feels much higher (and it’s only 200 meters below the Iron Cross) because the climb to it happens so suddenly, whereas we’d just gradually increased our elevation over a period of days before arriving at the Iron Cross. See below:

Right as I was starting the climb to La Faba, it began raining again. Fortunately, most of the path was through the woods, so it wasn’t quite the same downpour effect as the day before. However, because the previous day’s rain had also passed over this area, the path was incredibly muddy. (My friend Javier, who’d done this stretch the day before, had described the climb to O Cebreiro as “swimming upstream”.)

I once again found that I really loved climbing. The path to La Faba was really challenging, even aside from the rain and the mud. It’s never flat; it’s just a continuous and fairly steep angled path through the trees. Look how many equivalent flights of stairs I’d climbed by the time I arrived in La Faba (after an otherwise pretty flat day):

I passed quite a few people who had stopped for breathers on the way up. (And, in the book mentioned above, the author describes meeting people on this stretch who were crying and thinking seriously of giving up.) I just kept at it. Something about these climbs just triggered thoughts about how I’d spent the past two and a half years living in a fifth or sixth floor walk-up apartment, so without realizing it I’d been training for these parts of the Camino all of that time. I already knew I could do it.

Having passed so many people (and two people on horseback) on the climb, I was one of the first to arrive at the German albergue in La Faba. I took off my muddied shoes at the door and received a very kind welcome from the couple who had been volunteering there for the past two weeks; this was their last night before their replacements arrived. The place was, and remained, spotless despite the mud outside.

I had lunch in one of the two restaurants in town, a vegetarian place attached to the other albergue. I ended up at a table with two women from Bordeaux who, like so many other Europeans I’d met, had recently picked up where they’d left off on a previous Camino journey. It had been a few days since I’d last spoken French (I had last seen my friends Jean-Pierre, Dominique, and Marie-Claude the day before I arrived in León), so I was happy to chat with them for a few minutes before they went on their way; they were going all the way to O Cebreiro. So was Mark, who I ran into on my way out of lunch.

Back at my albergue, more people were starting to arrive, and I found Adam a few bunks from mine. We got into a conversation about one of the books he’d been reading, about the enneagram – a type of personality test (like Myers Briggs) that’s starting to get increased attention. Adam passed his tablet over to me, and I took the test to see which type I got. The results were really illuminating and sparked a great deal of reflection both on this day and throughout the rest of my time on the Camino. A few of the summary points really resonated with me: “Ambitious, competent, and energetic, [people of my personality type] can also be status-conscious and highly driven for advancement … [and] can also be overly concerned with their image and what others think of them. They typically have problems with workaholism and competitiveness.” This made SO much sense to me in the context of my reflections on how I’d been comparing myself to others, feeling rushed, and of course, how hard I’d worked in the past couple of years. These themes will appear in future posts and played a key role in a big lesson that I learned on my last day.