TRAIL Tale – CAMINO DE SANTIAGO

Like so many of you, I’m rather housebound these days. My backpack is doing nothing but gather dust. I haven’t seen my hiking boots for months. I can only look at mountains in pictures.

And I can’t even begin to research new hiking trips for fear that I might fall into a deep depression because we can’t go anywhere right now.

What better thing to do than reminisce and relive my previous hikes by picking favourite moments from each – be they scary, funny or the ones that have become legendary stories that get retold over and over again. Let’s go way back – to my first long distance hike that I started on this day in 2009 – The Camino de Santiago.
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Sure it’s a spiritual trek full of life lessons and other such grandiose, potentially life altering moments but those aren’t the things that first come to mind when I think of the Camino. It was 11 years ago now and these are the moments I remember the most.

Michael Jackson & the Italian Monk
I was on the Camino when the world learned that Michael Jackson died. You’ll recall that in 2009 there was nothing smart about your phone. Only birds tweeted. Insta-anything didn’t really exist. News came by way of TV or newspapers, and word of mouth.

​One night while eating dinner at an albergue, we were seated with at least six other hikers, one of whom was Angelo, an Italian monk. Picture a monk with a beard, wearing a brown robe with a rope belt, and sandals. I kid you not. He looked just like that. See:

Angelo was pointing at the TVs, clearly unhappy, even a little agitated. He didn’t speak English. We didn’t speak Italian. I knew enough basic Spanish (apparently it was close enough to Italian) to tell him Michael Jackson died. It involved rudimentary language and quite possibly the international sign language for ‘dead’.

I’ll never forget that moment – I thought he was upset about Michael Jackson but no, he was upset that the TVs were on during dinner!
We crossed paths with Angelo several times over the course of the first two weeks. He was constantly inviting people to mass. Nobody ever went. Looking back, I kind of wish I had.

Micheal Jackson’s death is forever etched in my memory as the night I broke both bread with and bad news to an Italian monk on the Camino.

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The Germans are coming! The Germans are coming!
This is by far one of the funniest moments I can remember. Ever been on a trail where there isn’t a safe, private place to pee? It happens to all of us – that moment when you just can’t hold it anymore – you gotta pee. That happened to my mom (she’ll be horrified that I’m sharing this story) but I just can’t help myself.

Around this time on the trail we crossed paths with a groups of German hikers. They walked fast, we walked slowly, but they took really long breaks so our paths kept leap frogging. It was in one of those times where we were ahead of them and my mom had to pee. I scouted ahead and couldn’t see anything that resembled a privacy screen – no accessible trees or large boulders.

She just couldn’t wait any longer (we’ve all been there, right?) and abruptly stopped in the middle of the road. This was the conversation:

Me: “Mom, there’s nowhere to pee”
Mom: “Is there anyone coming?”
Me: “No, it’s clear”
Mom: “Cover me”
Me: “Cover you? How? With what? My super hero cape? My bat woman wings? My wrap around shower curtain stall?”
Mom: “Stop laughing!”
Me: “Mom, hurry!”
Mom: “Why?”
Me: “THE GERMANS ARE COMING! THE GERMANS ARE COMING!”

At precisely that moment, mom with her pants down and me standing behind her pretending to hold my invisible super hero cape (when I raise my arms, it’s impenetrable from there to the ground – obviously), the group of Germans seemed to suddenly appear on the trail, having not in anyway slowed down their pace at all.  Nothing like getting caught with your pants down when the Germans are coming!
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Of course I don’t have a photo of that moment – how would I dare? So I will share this pretty little gem from the Road that is a classic example that sometimes the road is long without a place to pee:

Lady Karma & lost a pair of pants
One night we stayed in a church attic. It was a classic Camino experience with a shared pilgrim dinner – the kind of experience you see in films and read about in books about the Road. Pilgrims from different corners of the world (12  countries in all) sharing food and sleeping spaces – not showering and with access to the bare minimum of facilitates. That is your quintessential Camino experience. As is sleeping on the floor.

The next morning was your average morning – we got dressed in the darkness, packed up, thanked our host (a firefighter from San Fransisco) and hit the trail just as the sun was cresting the horizon. It wasn’t until a day or two later that we realized my mom was missing one of her two pair of pants. It didn’t take much detective work to figure out that she left them behind in that church attic. The dark brown pants would have been indistinguishable from the darkness in the wee hours of the morning. Now we just kept our fingers crossed that her one and only pair would make it through the next three weeks.

As you do, we told this story to the pilgrims we’d meet along the way. “Can you believe I lost a pair of pants?” One Irish guy laughed at her and couldn’t believe someone could lose an entire pair of pants. “How do you do that?!” Implying that it’s impossible. Zero sympathy.
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Enter Karma and her large dose of humility. A couple of days later we bumped into him again. Ironically he had found a whole new sympathy about losing a pair of pants. In the last 48 hours he lost the top half of a pair of convertible pant/shorts, which meant he only had the legs! Ah, sweet lady Karma and her revenge.

We let bygones be gone with the pants and we all had a lovely dinner together.

Running of the CowsLet’s just say many parts of the trail were very fragrant – not the flowery kind. The Camino crosses through a lot of farmland and the trail is also a path for cattle. So there’s a lot of “meadow muffins” left behind.

You can almost imagine what the cows are thinking – ‘where the heck are all those people going?’ Day after day they see people walking in the same direction. Your best chances of walking with the cows (not bulls – that’s Pamplona) is in Galicia. It feels that cows out number people. And they aren’t afraid.

Mom and I stopped for lunch one day at a little cafe and sat outside. The street was very narrow and somewhere between lunch and dessert we started to hear jingles. Cow bells! Who knew our lunch came with a front row seat to watch the cows go by.
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And then the next day we found ourselves walking WITH the cows! We thought it was the funniest thing. The cows were less than impressed.

I don’t know why this is such a strong memory but it is. Maybe because it’s such an unusual thing for me – to eat and walk beside cows – is not something I normally do.

What I actually learned

The guide books forget to tell you to pack humility:

• You have to be able to live in the moment, laugh when something funny or embarrassing happens.
• Recognize how incredibly privileged you are to walk this ancient trail.
• You are not the only person to step foot on the trail and you are certainly not the last.
• Just because you walked the Camino de Santiago doesn’t make you any more special than someone else.
• You don’t need to write a book about it, just live it and remember the moments. It’s your experience and no one else’s.

I guess in a way the big life-learning lesson about that trip is that I am comfortable in exactly who I am – I like to laugh and make other people laugh, I love storytelling, and I breathe best in wide open spaces.
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Guaranteed that if we ever meet you’ll hear me start a story with, “One time, on the Camino….”