We're doing it again, from Sahagun to Santiago
Here is where we stayed last night and tonight. It cost 56 euros* (vs 45 euros at much plainer place night before last). It’s a beautiful charming place. And has an outstanding restaurant. Some of the best food we’ve ever eaten on any Camino. Everyone is so nice to us.
As you can see from these photos, we aren’t exactly roughing it.
*Well, they only charged us 50 euros when we checked out.
On our first Camino (in 2013!) we flew into Madrid, took a long bus ride to Pamplona, and finally a 45 minute bus ride to Roncesvalles, and stayed the night. The next three days we walked back to Pamplona, the start of the 45 minute bus ride. This gave me pause at the time and started me thinking about why people walk the Camino.
Our bus ride and walk back are completely normal for the Camino and almost all pilgrims do similar things, but if we then had taken the bus from Pamplona to Logrono, the next large city on the Camino, it would have been completely contrary to the spirit of the Camino and virtually no pilgrims would do that. Why is the direction so important? I think this is fairly obvious if you go through the reasons for walking the Camino in a previous post. Still, it makes you think.
Later in the same Camino we got to a town and called up a hotel about ten miles off the Camino. They sent a car to pick us up and take us there, we spent the night, and the next morning they gave us a ride back the exact spot we had been picked up. They provided this service to attract pilgrim business. Other than staying in a hotel, which has somewhat less pilgrim status than staying in an albergue, this was perfectly acceptable pilgrim behavior.
Yesterday we walked from Bercianos towards Mansilla de las Mulas for about seven miles, called a taxi to come and take us to Mansilla, stayed the night in a lovely hotel, and in the morning called a taxi to take us back to where we were picked up and walked the rest of the way into Mansilla, where we are staying tonight in the same lovely hotel.
From the outside this is kind of a crazy thing to do but I’m sure you see that it completely within the spirit of walking the Camino. Apart from the slight issue of staying in a hotel and spending the taxi money (32 euros) no one would fault us for doing this, and, in fact, this is common pilgrim behavior and recommended in Camino guidebooks as a way to handle long sections without services that many people cannot walk.
Despite this “taxi up and back” being “Camino community approved” doing it was somewhat unsatisfying. There is a pleasure in just walking the normal path that seemed somehow missing. It wasn’t that there is something wrong with it but I’m not sure it is the best way to get the Camino experience we want. We might do it again if we need to but we will try to avoid it.
Thinking about these issues was fun for me and a fun thing to do while walking. So there is another reason for walking the Camino, it encourages us to think about things that you would not have thought about if you had stayed home.
Full disclosure: Okay, we are wimpy walkers and only taxied back six miles instead of the nine to get to where we were picked up. So sue me.
The most popular route of the Camino de Santiago is a 500 mile east to west walk across Northern Spain ending at Santiago de Compostela. It’s called the Camino Frances because it starts in France. Why would someone do this? Let’s see.
Religious reasons: The Camino follows a pilgrimage path used extensively in the middle ages and even before that. It was an official Catholic pilgrimage. There is complicated theology involving indulgences associated with it but basically people take a pilgrimage as an act of faith similar to giving something up for Lent.
Spiritual reasons: someone might perform a difficult task as an act of faith in themselves, to show that they can do it, to accomplish something significant, to spend some special time thinking things through.
Social reasons: the Camino is a unique social environment: hundreds of thousands of people walking the same path, staying in albergues (dormitories), making friends, having communal dinners, sharing a goal.
Tourist reasons: Spain varies widely in culture and geography. The Camino takes you through a lot of beautiful country and several cultural regions (starting in Basque country for example).
Hiking reasons: walking is a great way to get the feel of a region. The Camino is not like, say, the Appalachian Trail, that requires serious hiking skills and that you bring food, water, and camping equipment. You stay at albergues, you have coffee at local bars, you eat “pilgrims menus” at local restaurants, or cook communally at the albergue.
Most pilgrims have a mix of these reasons and others besides, many pilgrims walk after a death of someone close, a serious medical diagnosis, a divorce, etc as a way of working things through.
Our hotel in Bercianos (photos in previous post) had a bar/restaurant downstairs. Because of our jetlag and the excellent sun-blocking screens in our room, we slept till 9:15. This was our first day of walking so we hurriedly got dressed and went downstairs for coffee and breakfast. I was bold and asked if he could make us fried eggs and toast even though no menu advertised they were available. He didn’t seem thrilled about it but said “si”. He disappeared in the back and after not too long he brought us the eggs. They were perfect. After we were done I told him “los huevos fue perfectos” and asked him if he had cooked them. He said “no” and something about the house out back (I had trouble understanding his Spanish) so I decided that he said his wife who lives in the house behind the hotel made them in their house. (She’s the one who checked us in the night before.) We had noticed some chickens in a pen behind our hotel. So maybe he was telling us the eggs were from the chickens at the house behind the hotel. Anyway, they were delicious with the bright orange yolks we’ve come to expect in eggs in Spain. He turned out to be a friendly man. He asked us how far we were going to walk “today”. Mansilla? Reliegos? It was complicated to answer since we planned to do our taxi-two-step that Charlie described in a previous post, more complicated than my Spanish could handle, so I just said “Mansilla”. He said he thought that was too far for us to walk getting such a late start. So I said, well maybe Reliegos. That satisfied him.
Many many pilgrims have written books about the Camino. I’ve read dozens of them. Some are quite good, others so so. I’ve enjoyed almost all of them. One of my favorites was A Furnace Full of God by Rebekah Scott. She is an American woman married to a British man and they moved to Moratinos, a tiny pueblo on the Camino on the Meseta. They open their house to pilgrims, especially those having problems finding places to stay. She talked about how the women in Moratinos started crocheting “covers” for the trees on their town plaza. We walked through Moratinos on two previous caminos (2013 and 2014) but we never saw the tree afghans. I think those were started after we were there. Well, I think it must have caught on elsewhere because when we walked through El Burgo Ranero yesterday morning, we found trees wrapped in the colorful covers. El Burgo Ranero is about 15 miles from Moratinos (2 days walk for us). But we didn’t go through Moratinos this year. We started just past Moratinos.
They like high places. Notice there are several nests on the tower.
