2022 Camino Frances

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.

• Feeling near as faded as my jeans

The Meseta is a high plain in north central Spain, flat but not as flat as SE NM or west Texas. Many pilgrims do not like it and some skip it but we like it.

The Spanish rail clerks did not know Sahagún as we said it ”saw haw goon”. We wrote it down and they said, oh ”saw ah (barely said) goon”. I guess people in NM might not know of the place Wynette grew up if you said it ”tay haw tum”.

Now I’m starting to feel bad about making fun of the French for their linguistic strictness.

Restaurants in Spain typically have a fixed price menu like this, always a good bargain, with a few choices for each of two courses, bread, water or wine, and dessert.

We got there at one pm, way too early for lunch in Spain, so we had the place to ourselves.