Distance traveled: 23 kilometers

Today felt longer than the 23 kilometers would suggest! This is the last “short” day of the Camino. The next three days were all very long.

It was a beautiful walk through a lot of forest. I’m mostly going to let the scenery speak for itself here.

Midway through the morning, a Spanish man in his late 60’s offered me a particularly enthusiastic “¡Buen Camino!”, and somehow we started talking. Ramón, who became my “Spanish Camino dad”, turned out to be a local Galician who regularly does portions of the Camino recreationally. We walked together for about an hour, and since he speaks only Spanish, this was quite a linguistic workout for me! (I’d been speaking a lot of Spanish with Raul as well, but Ramón speaks pretty quickly, so it was more challenging with him.) I asked him something that had been on my mind for a while: isn’t it annoying to be on the Camino in your own country yet unable to communicate with most of the other pilgrims because so many of them are anglophones? Ramón assured me that this was not the case for him. “I have found that I can have conversations with pilgrims even if we don’t speak the same language. Every pilgrim is experiencing and feeling the same things, and somehow, we find ways to communicate that to each other.”

Ramón was such a beacon of kindness and generosity. Before parting ways, we exchanged contact information, and he told me with complete sincerity: “if your mother and aunt ever come to do the Camino, they must come and stay with me and my wife.” (I had mentioned that they were keen to do the Camino at some point.) He also gave me three beautiful stones that he had painted. “Two are for your mother and aunt to return to me when they come. The third is for you to return to the water in Fisterra.” All three stones had come from the water, and he was anxious for them to return to the water at some point. Fisterra is the town on the Atlantic coast where my journey will end.

I arrived in the town of Sarría around lunchtime. Sarría marks the point that’s about 100 kilometers from Santiago, and since the requirement to get the official Compostela (certificate of pilgrimage) is only to do the last 100 kilometers, it’s the point from which many of those last-100-kilometer pilgrims join the rest of us. I knew the last few days of the journey would be a time for trying to check my judgment and exercise patience as the route became more crowded with people who, in my not-so-humble opinion, had no idea what it was like to be a “real” pilgrim who’d already walked over 600 kilometers.

I wasn’t anxious to stay in Sarría with all these other new pilgrims, so I continued on to the next hamlet, called Barbadelo. (However, whenever I next do the Camino, I think I’ll stay in Sarría. It’s a pretty big town and would have been a nice break from all the much smaller towns of the past and upcoming days.)

Barbadelo was a pretty small place, and the best-looking albergue was already booked up. (With pilgrims who’d arrived by bus. Just saying.) Adam and I joined a handful of other people staying in a mostly empty albergue at the edge of town but did come back to the larger one for dinner. The place had a Meseta-like vibe that I didn’t love, so I made the decision to leave early the next morning. Adam and I also decided it was time for us to go our separate ways – we had spent so much of the Camino together, and something was pushing me to do the last bit on my own.