Walk This Way

From O'Cebreiro it's about 155km to Santiago. The pace I take to accomplish this stretch is different from how I planned, but in the end it turned out to be exactly what I wanted. I owe it almost completely to the new group I started to travel with. It resulted in an increase of pace in both how we walked and talked and made me realize that this was the first time I travelled with an all English speaking group for multiple days.

My days of receiving Spanish lessons and giving English lessons were behind me and I now had different friends that came complete with inside jokes, sarcasm, and random facts about the world that would otherwise be too hard to translate using elementary foreign language skills.

When we passed through Sarria, we reached the town where a lot of pilgrims start their Camino. It marks the last 100km of the Camino which is the minimum distance required to obtain a Compostella, or certificate showing completion of the pilgrimage all the way to Santiago.

We saw several new pilgrims and it seemed like more families started from this point together.  Though there were few, we still saw people from the first day starting back in St. Jean. I had never really considered doing the Camino any other way, but I understood how several of the people I met were on a schedule dictated by their job or other life demands.

I met a grandmother from Norway who, for the past few years, has taken a different grandchild each year to do a portion of the Camino in sequential order. I met two Spanish men who were best friends since their youth that took a week off from work every year to do different sections, and said that each time their packs are lighter as they gained experience on what they really need to carry. I met a woman who was 7 months pregnant. I met people who started 750km before St Jean in Le Puy, France and I met a couple that started in Geneva who had been walking since April. I met a man who started walking from Holland.

When I meet others who, like me, are taking the 30 some odd days to complete the entire Camino Frances route, I find that they're mostly students or teachers on summer break, retirees, or people unemployed or between jobs. It covers a wide spectrum of ages, experience and wisdom, and we all have to start somewhere...and finish too.