Distance traveled: 24.2 km

Our good luck when it came to the weather had run out; after enjoying only dry walks after the first day that began in the rain, today started and ended in the rain. We suited up as best as we could while still inside and then started walking.

I learned again that nothing is truly waterproof; within 30 minutes, everything I was wearing was thoroughly soaked. We were lucky that it wasn’t yet cold enough to make this dangerous, though I was definitely cold. I learned that stopping actually made things feel worse: as soon as you got out of the rain, you became more aware of how wet you really were, and as soon as you went back into the rain, you felt ten times colder. I was thankful to have Adam by my side to keep the conversation flowing so that I could focus on something else.

In the late morning, we passed through our first grape vines in quite a while. I so wished I could have walked through these on a nicer day; the colors were already striking under the gray sky:

We arrived at the 200 kilometer mark in the afternoon. I think perhaps I look more soaked in the picture below, though I don’t know how that could be possible:

Again, this would have been pretty to walk through on a sunny day…

Upon arrival in Villafranca, I had my first experience of showing up to an albergue and being told that it was full. (Unfortunately for us, this albergue was on the other side of town; we’d walked about 10 extra minutes in order to get there.) It was the same story at the second one we tried. Apparently, people had thought to call ahead given the weather. My patience was non-existent at that point, so I checked myself into a hotel (which I knew would have vacancies!), and Adam eventually found a comfortable place for himself. (This was my least pilgrim-like moment of the Camino, I think.)

Stepping into a hot bath was as pleasant as the rain had been unpleasant, though part of me grimaced at the idea of submerging myself in water when I was so thoroughly soaked already. I gave all of my clothes to the hotel staff to wash and dry for me and spent the next several hours recovering in bed. Thankfully, everything inside my backpack had stayed dry within the individual plastic bags in which I’d packed everything. The backpack itself was soaked through despite the rain cover. Nothing is waterproof!!!

I eventually emerged into a rain-free evening and met Mark and Adam for dinner at a nearby restaurant. Mark had ended up in a hotel too, just around the corner from mine. It was a relaxed end to a very tough day.

Distance covered: 32.5 kilometers 

I think this was my second-longest day of walking on the Camino (in terms of time) and probably the single most challenging one physically. But what a day it was!

Mark, Raul, and I set off very early from the Stone Boat. Our goal was to catch the sunrise from the town just below the Iron Cross (more on that below), which was about six kilometers away. We needed our headlamps for the walk, and it was very cold, in part because it grew increasingly windy as the elevation rose and we became more exposed to the moving air.

In Foncebadón, we had time for what was the best breakfast of the Camino before continuing up to the Iron Cross. I don’t know what this place put in their eggs and bacon, but it was so satisfying! We bundled up to the max – I think I was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, my down jacket, my rain jacket, gloves, one Buff over my hair, and one Buff pulled up onto most of my face – and started the climb.

Now, the Iron Cross is the highest point on the entire Camino. We had been climbing steadily the prior day and earlier that morning, so we didn’t have a particularly steep or long way up from Foncebadón. We did, however, have a nice view over the land beneath us once the sun finally came out.

The real claim to fame of this site is not its altitude but its spiritual significance. Traditionally, pilgrims bring a stone to place under the cross as a symbol of their problems, burdens, and sorrows that they want to leave behind as they continue on their journey. I had carried my stone all the way from Paris; it came from the garden behind my office. More than anything, what I wanted to leave behind me at the Iron Cross was the way I had worked for the past two years and the toll that had taken on numerous aspects of my life and health, so bringing a stone from my office seemed appropriate. I had also written out a little note about a different subject that I wanted to leave behind. I thought both of these objects were important; as I’d been reflecting throughout the Camino to that point, I wanted to make sure that my life moving forward would be one far less dominated by work and far more full of love.

There were a handful of other pilgrims at the cross when we arrived. Everyone took turns climbing to the base of the cross to place their stone or just to have a moment of prayer or reflection. When my turn came, I tucked my note under some other stones and placed my stone nearby. I kept my fingers on my stone, closed my eyes, and said a quick prayer of thanks for the strength of body and spirit that had carried me through the tough years at work and to this point on the Camino, and I asked for continued support of the new direction in which I was trying to guide my life. I didn’t feel a rush of any particular emotion or any kind of release, but I appreciated the exercise – and I like knowing that, on a high point in a remote part of northern Spain, there is a stone symbolizing the experiences I’ve chosen to put behind me.

We ended up spending close to an hour around the Iron Cross. Adam eventually caught up to us, and Mark led our group in song. (I wish I had a good video of it, because this actually brought tears to my eyes. Just try to imagine singing “Amazing Grace” in such a setting!)

Finally, still freezing and knowing we needed to get a move on, we started down the other side of the summit.

Perhaps at this point some unburdening had taken place without my realizing, because I ended up laughing a ton in the next hour. Adam and I somehow got into a discussion about what it means to be a “dork”.  This led to us asking various other people “is either of us a dork? Who is dorkier?”, and the response – universally – was “Kendra’s not a dork!” Now, if you’re reading this and went to high school and/or college with me, I hope you have a smile on your face; I was utterly unprepared for that response. Both of those educational institutions are renowned for the dorkiness of their student bodies, and I’d long considered it a foregone conclusion that I fit the mold. Apparently, though, to the extent that people associate the word “dork” with someone smart but a bit socially awkward, that wasn’t how people on the Camino saw me. “Kendra’s too cool to be a dork.” This was a revelation to me! (Adam and I agreed between us, however, that both of us qualify as “Camino dorks” – particularly Adam. We’re both charmingly obsessed with the Camino.)

About 45 minutes down from the Iron Cross, we came to a “village” with a single inhabitant…

The guy who lives here has declared himself the last remaining Templar Knight. He provides tea and coffee to passing pilgrims, and I think if you are so inclined you can choose to spend the night in his stone barn – without electricity or running water. We popped in to say hello (no pictures allowed) and then kept moving.

Adam and Mark had warned me that the descent from the Iron Cross would be tough, characterized by steep, uneven terrain and a long stretch without access to bathrooms. I had managed to limit my need for the baño de los árboles (tree bathroom) to that 16-kilometer stretch leaving Carrión de los Condes and still wasn’t keen on the idea, but I was assured that there would be nothing to duck behind further down, so I settled for the better-safe-than-sorry approach of almost literally freezing my ass off behind some bushes on top of a mountain. My all-male group applauded in unison for me as I strode back to them through the brush.

Difficult or not, we had great scenery on the way down:

The descent didn’t end up being so terrible – I found it better than the one coming down from the wind turbines past Pamplona, perhaps because I made more of an effort this time to go slowly and to place my feet with care in order to minimize pressure on my toes. We finally made it to the next town in time to sit down for lunch, and then we carried on with our descent. Adam and I served as Camino Angels for Andrea, a recently retired high school Spanish teacher from Minnesota who was just a little too much in her head that afternoon and worried about falling and injuring herself on the way down. We stayed with her every step of the way until we reached Molinaseca.

At that point, we would have been well justified in stopping for the day, and many pilgrims who had arrived before us were already enjoying a celebratory cerveza as we entered the town. Adam and I had decided we would just make a game time decision about whether or not to press on to Ponferrada. Perhaps because Adam and Mark had done such a good job of managing my expectations about the descent from the Iron Cross, I felt like I was in pretty good shape and thought that the right thing for me to do was keep going.

Adam, Mark, Raúl, and I started out of town together and then ended up splitting into pairs for the eight kilometers into Ponferrada. Raúl and I walked several hundred yards ahead of Adam and Mark. By the time we finally arrived in Ponferrada, we were all totally exhausted but very proud of ourselves. We were among the last to check in to the big municipal albergue but managed to score a room just for the four of us. I think it was around 6:00 when we arrived, and we’d left Rabanal at 6:00 that morning – so it was a very long day indeed!

Distance traveled: 20.5 km

Raúl and I made sure we were the first ones at the cafe serving chocolate con churros when it opened the following morning. Talk about a breakfast of champions!

It was still quite early when we got moving – that is the moon, still high in the sky!

We encountered a small chapel just past the edge of town and decided to pop in. (Raúl, unlike me, had been collecting stamps in his pilgrim passport from churches and other places as well as albergues. He had to buy a new passport in Astorga to accommodate more stamps!) We were only inside for five minutes of prayer, but when we emerged, full daylight had replaced the dark, and we took that as a sign that God had rewarded our stopping for prayer!

The next couple of hours passed peacefully through a handful of towns, on a path gradually increasing in elevation and consequently quite foggy in certain places.

As you can see, the road was quite crowded; we weren’t sure why. While it had been a few days since I’d been able to look in either direction without seeing other pilgrims, it hadn’t been nearly this packed at any point before, and it wouldn’t be like that again until the last couple of days before arriving in Santiago.

In one small town, we encountered the Cowboy Bar, which aspired to be a little outpost of Texas here in Castilla y León:

At this point, we’re starting a gradual climb into the mountains that I had seen way off in the distance on my way out of León. I hadn’t had a good climb since the day I left Castrojeriz, so I was looking forward to this next challenge!

There was a stretch not long before our arrival in Rabanal that was pretty tough – it went uphill through the woods on a pretty uneven path. Raúl flew ahead of me (he builds climbing walls for a living, so he’s quite sure-footed in such circumstances!), and I did my best to keep up while relying more than usually heavily on my trekking poles. It really got our blood flowing!

We arrived in Rabanal in time for a late lunch. Raúl and I grabbed seats in the sun outside a cafe and waited for Mark and Adam, who were somewhere behind us. Mark had already told me that I could take the room he’d reserved for his sister Becky, who’d gone on a day ahead with Javier, so I was planning to stay. Raúl had been more inclined to continue on to Foncebadón, which was another 5.6 kilometers up; the next day would be tough and long, and he thought it would make more sense to get a head start. Ultimately, he ended up staying – he walked with me and Mark to check in at our guest house, and the owner told us she’d just comp us the third and final room!

Mark had heard about this guest house in advance. It’s called the Stone Boat (which has significance later on the Camino; stay tuned) and is owned by an American woman who did the Camino years ago during the winter and found it so transformative that she felt called to come back. She bought this house and turned it into a three-room guest house. The rooms are simply and very comfortably furnished, and she gave us real wax seals as stamps in our passports as well as homemade banana bread to take with us the next day.

Raúl ended up having another good reason to have stayed in Rabanal rather than going on. Rabanal is home to a few Benedictine monks who perform their various sung prayer services in a tiny, you-can’t-believe-it’s-still-standing church at the other end of the small town. I went to the late afternoon and then evening services, both of which consisted almost entirely of the monks chanting in Latin. It was pretty different from anything I’d experienced before!

Mark, Raúl, and I joined Adam and a couple of people staying with him at the albergue run by the British pilgrim organization (they serve afternoon tea everyday) for a very nice dinner that evening. Everyone was excited for the next day, when we’d finally arrive at one of the most famous points on the Camino: the Cruz de Ferro (Iron Cross).

Distance traveled: 28.3 km

My day began early in anticipation of rain. For the first time since the very first day, I put the rain cover on my backpack. I started walking in the dark and had a semi-creepy 30 minutes of walking through corn fields with only my phone to light the way.

The next town was Hospital de Orbigo, home to a medieval jousting tournament on its main bridge, which as you can see below is very long (it’s not just over the water):

I stopped here for breakfast and then ran into a guy named Raúl whom I’d met briefly in León. He’s originally from Colombia but now lives in the US, and he was clearly a popular guy on the Camino – he seemed to be friends with everyone he encountered, and for good reason: he’s incredibly nice. He and I started walking together and stayed together the rest of the day and for much of the next several days. While we were never more than friends, we started to joke that he was my “Camino boyfriend” and I was his “Camino girlfriend”.

The walk was much more pleasant today compared to the day before. We passed through fields and forests, and we could see signs that autumn was arriving – the trees were finally starting to change color.

Around noon, we reached a summit overlooking the town just before Astorga. It was a great view, and someone at the top was playing guitar and singing amusing songs for the passing pilgrims.

At the bottom of the hill, we encountered yet another statue of a pilgrim, and Raúl introduced me to his practice of taking a picture of himself imitating the statues. It was a little hard for me to achieve the exact look of this one because my water bottle was a bag that needed to be held with two hands, but close enough:

There was a pretty steep climb right when we arrived in Astorga, so we were delighted to find that the municipal albergue was the first building on our left. This albergue reminded me a lot of the one in Roncesvalles on my first night. It was quite large and staffed entirely by volunteers. Raúl and I lucked out and somehow got assigned to a four-person room rather than to one of the larger dorms. To my delight, a retired Brazilian couple took the other two beds, and I got to listen to them speaking Portuguese with Raúl. (Portuguese is my favorite of the languages I’ve studied, and while I can’t speak much of it anymore, I can still understand a decent amount!)

Astorga has a few claims to fame, including a chocolate museum (which I had originally wanted to go to but then found myself without the energy to walk to, given that it wasn’t in the center of town), a house designed by Gaudi, and a cathedral. Raúl and I managed to get in a cathedral visit while our clothes went through a wash cycle at a nearby laundromat. I liked the cathedral a lot and finally have some pictures to show!

Back at the laundromat, we encountered a retired couple who turned out to be from Virginia. The husband had walked the Camino a few years before and, upon arriving in Astorga, had suddenly been seized with the feeling that he and his wife were meant to live there. He returned to the US and convinced her to make the move. They don’t speak Spanish but are very happy in their new life there! We asked them for a recommendation for where to get some good hot chocolate, since this is the chocolate town, and we got two names. We decided to get a snack at the first place and then try to get hot chocolate for breakfast at the second place the next morning.

It did not disappoint!

That evening before dinner Raúl and I joined a handful of other pilgrims in the little chapel of the albergue for a prayer service led by a very old and nearly toothless priest. It turned out to be one of the most moving moments of the Camino for me. The priest read the story of Jesus on the road to Emmaus: after Jesus’ resurrection, he joins some of his disciples who are walking to Emmaus, but they do not recognize him. He walks all day with them, and finally in the evening they see who he really is. The priest reminded us that the same is true on the Camino: Jesus walks beside every pilgrim; we see evidence of this in the many forms of kindness and generosity that we encounter in others. That rang so true for me, and for the others at the prayer service. I think everyone cried.

Raúl and I joined Mark and Adam (who had reappeared as expected) for dinner and brought along someone else who’d been at the prayer service, a British minister who’d recently had some sort of powerful religious experience while walking – I can’t remember now what the story was. It was a nice way to end a very good day.

Distance traveled: 25.4 km

This was my least favorite day of walking on the Camino. But take heart: it involves a choice of routes, and I chose wrong! You can avoid my experience on your own Camino.

Adam and I headed out of town at the usual starting time. There was quite a bit of the city to get through on the way out; we passed this statue of a pilgrim in a plaza:

And then got treated to this view as we crossed the river:

During the short stretches when the Camino goes through big cities like this, it’s inevitably not going to look as romantic as it does 95% of the time. The picture below is a good illustration (though we did get a rainbow!).

About 90 minutes out of town, the route forks, and pilgrims can choose to follow the original Camino route (what I did) or to follow a more modern route (which Adam did). I’d followed the original route all this time and felt that it was worth continuing; Adam had gone the original route on his first Camino and wanted to see what the other way was like. Saying good-bye to each other after having spent so much time together was strange, even though we were pretty certain we’d reunite again soon!

With the brief exception of 10 minutes walking through a wooded area, the rest of my walk that day was right on a main highway. Sometimes we walked on a sidewalk; sometimes we walked on the actual side of the road. It never felt dangerous but definitely wasn’t pleasant, particularly when trucks drove past. This was the first time I attempted to listen to music and podcasts to tune out my surrounding environment.

When I arrived in San Martín del Camino, I saw that once again the cast of Camino characters had been mostly reshuffled in León. Mark stayed at my albergue that night, but his was the only familiar face. I met a Brazilian girl named Lila, a British guy named Peter, and a young American named Chad, all of whom would reappear along the rest of the route. We had a pleasant communal meal in our albergue that evening and then went to bed a bit earlier than usual. Rain was forecast for the next day, starting around mid-morning, so I decided it was worth getting an early start.

Distance travelled: 17.9 km

We had spent a pretty uncomfortable night in our cramped room, which was warm and loud, so despite the total lack of urgency to arrive in León, Adam and I found ourselves leaving the albergue around 6:00 a.m., while the moon was still well up in the sky:

I had heard that the walk into León was pretty comparable to the one into Burgos, so I my expectations were appropriately pretty low for the next several hours. I think that ended up being helpful; I didn’t find the road into León nearly as tedious.

I had a pretty powerful revelation while we were walking in the dark. This was a huge lesson for me on multiple levels, and I see it as one of the strongest forms of proof that “the Camino provides”. For the past week, a pilgrim had been in and out of my orbit, and I’d found it difficult to really warm to her. We’d had plenty of conversations and definitely identified as Camino friends at this point, but on my side I had felt some kind of barrier to a fuller connection. I finally realized what it was: this woman embodied all of my biggest insecurities. For me, the typical mental discomfort experienced by pilgrims on the Meseta had manifested in my reactions to this woman! I had continually been comparing myself to her. This goes hand in hand with the lessons I’d already been learning on the Camino about judgment; I think I was even less conscious prior to this moment of how often I compared myself to others than I’d been of how much I judged others. In this case, I’d been comparing myself to this woman and always finding myself wanting. We were the same age, almost to a day, but quite different. She is probably the skinniest person I saw on the Camino; I could, at best, be described as “slim” but never skinny. She started each day with an hour of meditation before walking, practiced yoga in the evenings, maintained a strictly vegetarian and alcohol-free diet, had a smaller backpack than mine, and walked faster that I did. More importantly, she’d also spent time living in France, but unlike me, she’d managed to be in a long-term relationship with a French man during her residency; part of the reason I’d decided to move back to the US was because I hadn’t found anyone to keep me in France. Finally, she’d traveled even more than I had and had managed to have a job that paid the bills but hadn’t taken over her life, whereas I had just left a job that had taken both health and happiness from my life. My source of discomfort wasn’t that I wanted this woman’s life or to be her; it was the fact that I saw before me someone who exhibited the self-discipline relating to her physical health that I’ve always lacked (and been particularly conscious of in recent years) and who’d clearly prioritized different things, with the result that she’d had a life and in particular, as I perceived it, a freedom that was easy to envy. I think she was a Camino Angel of sorts for me; I believe that the Camino brought us together so that she could serve as an inspiration and example for me once I got back to the real world and would be trying to start a whole new life for myself, one that I was determined would revolve around the kind of self-love that this other pilgrim clearly demonstrated.

(Additionally, they say that “the real Camino begins in Santiago”, that is, once you’ve completed the pilgrimage and returned to your normal life. I find it perfectly fitting, and not at all surprising, that I’m typing this now, four weeks into the Coronavirus quarantine, and am at a point of wanting to re-commit myself to the physical wellness practices that I’ve let slip in the past month. Writing about this lesson reminds me of how important it is that I do that. The Camino continues to provide!)

Anyway, back to the walk. The road into León led us through a series of towns that gradually shifted into the outskirts of a much larger urban area. León has a population of over 450,000, so it’s an even bigger city than Burgos. While the route wasn’t particularly sightly, I found the time passed quickly thanks to good conversation with other pilgrims and a general sense of anticipation.

Once again, I planned to treat myself to a hotel room for my stay in “the big city”. I hadn’t made any reservations in advance, but Adam, Sam, Rosa, and I ended up in a very nice hotel run by a Camino veteran. My room didn’t have a bathtub, but it still felt luxurious relative to the albergues!

We arrived in time for lunch. Adam and I ended up joining Mark and Becky for pizza at a place just across from the cathedral, and then we decided to lean into the relaxing Sunday afternoon atmosphere by going in search of Vermouth. We found it!

I had decided that it was finally time for me to take a day of rest, so I stayed in León on Monday as well. This turned out to be a great decision because it rained for most of Monday, and I got texts from friends who’d gone on ahead that they’d been caught in a hail storm! I didn’t feel like I physically needed the day off – my blisters and tendinitis were healed, and I felt like I’d really hit my stride – but I’d been feeling increasingly tempted to “hurry”. This was another theme of my Camino: awareness of putting pressure on myself for no reason. At this point, I couldn’t have been more free to finish the Camino in my own time. I didn’t have a home to return to in Paris, and I hadn’t yet bought my ticket to return to the US. Nonetheless, I felt more and more inclined to rush, so I decided I need to just force myself to stay put for a day. I ended up making my plans to return to the US on my day off; at this point, it was October 14, and I booked a flight back to the US for November 25. I knew I needed something more concrete so that I could start mentally and emotionally preparing myself for the big event.

As I had in Burgos, I used my down time in León to do a little shopping. I picked up an expensive pair of waterproof pants given that there was some rain in the forecast, and again, I treated myself to some face and hair masks. Other than those errands and making my travel plans, the only other significant thing I did in León was visit the cathedral. I had heard so many people gushing about the beauty of the Burgos cathedral (which I’d been too lazy/hurried to see) that I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss out on this one. I don’t have any pictures to share because as soon as I stepped inside, I felt very much that I was in a place of worship, that I was there for prayer and not for tourism. I did a loop inside the sanctuary and found myself growing frustrated by all of the people who were on their phones and/or talking in loud voices; I felt they were disturbing the spiritual ambience. I spent about 10 minutes kneeling in a pew and talking to God. He might have talked back; a few new thoughts entered my head, and I found myself tearing up. I’m very glad I took the time to go there.

I had a great dinner on Monday night with Adam, Mark, Becky, Javier, and Judy. We sat in another of the city’s plazas and feasted on various types of steak with copious amounts of red wine. It was the perfect way to celebrate the end of another major stage of the Camino.

Some of my favorite days on the Camino are coming up this week, so stay tuned! (Come back on Tuesday for the next post, since tomorrow is my rest day.)

Distance traveled: 26.6 kilometers

This was the last real day of the Meseta. Although the Meseta actually continues a bit beyond León, the big city I reached the next day, I think this stretch between Burgos and León is what people have in mind when they think about the part of the Camino that challenges you mentally. Past León, the landscape becomes more varied again (we get some forests and significant changes in elevation), and there is just a different energy to the experience.

Adam and I left Bercianos and stopped in the next town for breakfast. We found our friend Mark and my Australian friends just finishing what they promised was one of the best breakfasts they’d encountered, and Mark ended up lingering to walk on with us. I ran into my French friends again as well after not having seen them since the day I arrived in Frómista.

The next several hours looked pretty much like this:

At this point, the Camino runs parallel to the tracks for the trains that run between León and Burgos; the tracks are far enough away that you can’t hear the trains, but you can see them on the right side as you walk on. When I eventually took a train back across Spain from Santiago, I could see this part of the Camino (with its one tree per ten meters all along the path), and it brought me a lot of joy.

It was easy walking on a fine day. We stopped a couple of times to take a break at picnic tables that had been set up near the path.

As we had for Burgos, we stayed outside León near enough that we’d only have to walk a few hours in the morning. Mansilla de las Mulas was a cute little town, though there wasn’t much we could do or see there because it was a national holiday, and everything that wasn’t an albergue was closed.

I went with Sam and Rosa (the Australians) for a refreshing foot soak in the river. What a lovely place this would be to play as a kid in the summer!

Our hostel that night wins the prize for the most cramped quarters I experienced on the Camino. We had 10 people sleeping in a room that wasn’t any larger than an average bedroom – things were very close indeed!

I was excited to get to León the next day. I’d heard that the walk into León was possibly worse than the one into Burgos, but I was better able to manage my expectations at this point, and once again, I had a hotel room to look forward to!

Distance travelled: 23.3 kilometers

It had been a strange night.

As had become my habit, I went to bed wearing an eye mask and ear plugs. At this point, I found that snoring no longer woke me up, though I could still hear it through my ear plugs during the few times each night when I woke up anyway. I never slept particularly well on the Camino, and I’m not sure why – perhaps some of it was to do with drinking wine right before going to bed. In any case, I went from my normal of waking only once (if at all) during the night to waking up several times a night and, often, having trouble falling immediately back to sleep.

On this particular night, I woke up not long after midnight to some very strange sounds.

I was sleeping in the bottom bunk, with Adam sleeping in the bunk above mine and our Spanish roommate sleeping in the bottom bunk perpendicular to mine. (Her feet were near my head.) I thought the sounds I was hearing were coming from above me. I never took out my ear plugs, and I took off my mask only for the second it took to look at my phone to see what time it was. For about ten minutes, what I heard sounded like someone having a very bad dream: there was progressively louder moaning, bordering on crying out, and the sound of thrashing around. Eventually, the non-verbal sounds transitioned into actual speech that I had trouble making out. It sounded like Spanish, but I only caught one word – I’ll come back to that. It was a man’s voice that I heard, and Adam does speak Spanish, so I assumed that Adam was having a really bad nightmare that happened to be taking place in Spanish. It was very unsettling, though – towards the end, he really sounded like he’d been possessed by a demon, and that is part of the reason I didn’t remove my mask or ear plugs… I wanted to keep blocking this out!

The next morning, the three of us woke up around the same time, and our Spanish roommate immediately left the room to go outside for a cigarette. I cautiously remarked to Adam, “it sounded like you had a really bad dream last night…” He stared at me for a split second and then said: “you heard that too?”

Hmm. I heard that too? “Wait… what did you hear?”

Adam and I compared stories, and it turns out that he heard exactly the same thing I did, except that he was convinced the sound came from the bunk of our roommate – he knew it wasn’t me. The only other difference between our stories was the one word that we’d each discerned from the otherwise unintelligible speech (which he also thought was Spanish). I had heard the word “oye” – the command to “listen” or “hear” in Spanish. Adam had heard “Deus” – the word for “God”.

Hear God?!?!?!?!

We got out of that albergue as fast as we could. There was a distinct sense of creepiness in our room; I also observed that several flies that had been buzzing around the room the evening before were now dead on the floor, for no reason I could come up with.

Adam and I spent the next two hours going over the details of this occurrence and speculating about what it could all mean. Were we the chosen recipients of this message to “hear God”? If so, why?! Had our roommate in fact been possessed by some sort of spirit, whose masculine voice had come out from her body? If so, had this been a one-time occurrence? If not, is it possible that she heard the voice too, and in fact there had been some sort of ghost in our room speaking to us? If it was some sort of spirit, why was he there, and who was he? Was it the spirit of a Templar Knight from hundreds of years ago?

We encountered our roommate again later in the morning when we stopped for a coffee and of course could barely act normally – we just exchanged smiles and a “Buen Camino!” She seemed completely normal, which suggested to us that she hadn’t been aware of anything strange the night before. (It’s really hard for me to convey just how scary and weird this episode was while it was taking place. I can’t imagine how anyone who heard it could not comment on it the next morning.)

Something else very strange happened later in the morning. I had been telling Adam about a man in my life in Paris, and he came up again in our conversation that morning. Adam said “I predict that you will receive a message from him today.” And, lo and behold, about 15 minutes later… a text from him popped up on my phone. The really astonishing coincidence, though, was that the message recommended that I listen to something… and the name of the album whose cover art appeared in the text was the name of a song I’d been listening to since Burgos and that had become my unofficial Camino anthem. I am still trying to work out the significance of that in all of this.

Anyway… Adam and I remained very keyed up about everything the entire rest of the morning as we approached Sahagún, a larger town whose principal significance comes from being the official halfway point of the Camino Francés. There’s an office somewhere in town that will present you with a halfway certificate. We were glad to be only passing through Sahagún as, perhaps because of our heightened state of spiritual awareness/anxiety, the place gave us what can only be described as a weird vibe. We saw our roommate one more time and actually spoke to her briefly (it turns out that she grew up in Spain but now lives in Switzerland); then we sat down for sandwiches at maybe the fourth restaurant we tried – the other ones we’d entered had all made us uneasy in some way. I know it sounds nuts; I think for all of this, you just need to have been there…

After leaving Sahagún, the route splits into two options – one way traces an old Roman road, and the other stays on the classic Camino path. We chose the latter (principally because it’s one kilometer shorter) and spent a comparatively tranquil couple of hours walking on a tree-lined path next to a small road with infrequent traffic.

Bercianos del Real Camino proved to be close to a carbon copy of Terradillos, right down to the accommodation: we stayed in an albergue owned by the same people as the one the night before and offering exactly the same menu in the restaurant. This time, Adam and I had an Italian man as our roommate, and I’m pleased to report that we passed a night uninterrupted by voices of any kind.

To close: it’s apparently very common for pilgrims on the Camino to have strange encounters of the sort I have described here. This path has been considered to have spiritual importance since pagan times, so you might say that its spiritual traffic is heavy. Pilgrims of centuries past frequently died en route – there are pilgrim cemeteries along the way – so it is not entirely outside the realm of possibilities (for anyone who concedes that ghosts might exist) that some spirits may have lingered. We’ll never know!

Distance travelled: 26.6 kilometers

We had a daunting morning ahead of us as we left Carrión de los Condes. As I mentioned yesterday, the next town was over 16 kilometers away, and by that I mean there is literally nothing between the two towns. It is 16 kilometers of tree-lined path through fields, with no toilets or [legal] places to stop for a drink or snack. (Keep in mind that 16 kilometers is further than the total distance I’ve walked on certain days up to this point.) This is what it looked like, the whole way:

Fortunately, I had Adam with me, and we found plenty of ways to laugh to pass the time. I finally had my first experience of using “el baño de los árboles”, i.e. peeing behind a tree, and I found that it was not as horrible as expected. 🙂 I was very, very glad to reach the end of that stretch, though.

We stopped for lunch at that cafe and then carried on.

Now, the next 24 hours would prove to be very strange for me and Adam.

It began as we exited this little hamlet and found ourselves entirely alone on the Camino.

There had been no shortage of people either ahead of or behind us. At least 100 pilgrims should have been in the process of making their way from this hamlet to the next town where people were likely to stay the night.

We realized pretty quickly that we were alone and kept commenting on it. It literally seemed as though an alien spacecraft had descended and abducted everyone. We couldn’t figure out where they’d all gone! For the next six kilometers, we saw only one other pilgrim. And when we arrived in Ledigos, the town where we assumed people had stopped, we encountered almost no one. The town was eerily silent and still; only a brief encounter with the British woman I’d met several days before offered any signs of life.

We decided to press on to Terradillos de los Templarios, which is another little hamlet made up of essentially two albergues and a church. According to my guide, Terradillos dates to the late Roman period and was controlled by the Templar Knights in the 13th century. “The village also harbors a mystery: this is the place the last Templar Knights hid the fabled hen that lay golden eggs and was a source of their wealth.” [shrug] I didn’t see or hear anything more about this, but it was interesting to find a connection to the Templar Knights…

Our albergue had a pleasant lawn, and when Adam and I arrived, we saw Mark sitting in front of the building. Adam and I were put in a four-person room with a Spanish woman neither of us had seen or met before; we exchanged only brief greetings upon our arrival before she disappeared.

We took care of our laundry and then settled down for a beer on the lawn. It was a pretty good way to pass the time until dinner, which we ate with Mark.

We also got a nice sunset:

Tomorrow’s post will relay the very strange events of the coming evening at this albergue… stay tuned.

Distance travelled: 18.7 kilometers

This was a shorter day, but there was no avoiding it – the next town after Carrión de los Condes is another 16 kilometers away, so continuing on would have meant a very long day indeed.

I walked for a while out of Frómista with Andrea, the retired Spanish teacher from Minnesota. We decided to be the non-conformists who took the alternate route out of town – it was a tiny bit longer but allowed us to walk through fields rather than on the road, which I thought was a great trade; I don’t know why more people weren’t willing to do it! We did eventually end up walking next to the road with everyone else. Most of the way into Carrión de los Condes looked like this:

About 40 minutes outside of town, I ran into an older Spanish man who lived in Carrión de los Condes and was out for his morning walk. He was excited to find a Spanish-speaking pilgrim and talked energetically with me all the way to the edge of town, where he then pointed me in the direction of the albergue I wanted and wished me a Buen Camino.

It was just around noon when I arrived, and I was the second person to check into the albergue Santa María, which is another classic Camino experience. This albergue is run by nuns, and they’ve become famous for their late-afternoon hour of singing with pilgrims. I’ll get back to that in a moment.

I dropped my stuff and set off to explore the town. I went into a shop selling every conceivable type of pilgrim supplies and picked up a few snacks at a grocery store before coming back and running into Javier, the engineer from Seattle whom I’d met back in Grañón. He was still walking with Mark (the lawyer from San Francisco) and his sister Becky. I was really pleased to find someone I’d met before Burgos. Although I’d had some pleasant interactions with the French and Australian pilgrims, I had been feeling pretty alone; so far, my experience on the Meseta was that everyone kind of kept to themselves. Whereas in the first portion of the Camino people had pretty immediately suggested coordinating to stay in the same albergue the following night, no one made any such offers to me this time – people were happy to talk to me as and when they encountered me, but each pair or group had their own agenda and didn’t seem to be interested in factoring anyone else into their planning. I wasn’t taking it personally, but it was a bit of a bummer after how friendly people had been before.

Anyway, Javier and I sat down to get a beer and get to know each other a bit better, and Becky soon joined us. The three of us eventually went in search of more substantial fare and ended up getting some great food (including my first octopus of the Camino!) at a place a few blocks away. Mark arrived a little later on.

We reconvened at the albergue for the singing hour, and as I was coming down the stairs to the assembly point, I heard a voice that sounded familiar. It was Adam! He’d done a long day from quite a ways before Frómista and ended up grabbing the last bed in the albergue. I was so happy to have one member of my Camino family back!

I wish I had pictures or video from the singing hour, but it didn’t feel right in the moment to do that. Three nuns led us in singing a variety of songs in different languages, and once again, we went around the room to introduce ourselves and say why we were doing the Camino. At the end, the nuns invited people to offer their own songs to the group. A Korean guy sang a beautiful song in Spanish – not a language he actually spoke – that brought tears to my eyes and those of many people around me, and Mark led the group in singing a song called “Amen” that I’d hear several more times from him in the weeks to come. It was a not-to-be-missed experience!

We had a fun evening. Mark, Javier, and I had some drinks out in the plaza, and then we formed a large group for dinner in a nearby restaurant. I met Raúl, a guy originally from Bogotá; he’ll show up in future posts too. We had a very nice time together and made it back to the albergue just before it locked up for the night!