Antes de salir

When I first mentioned to Stanley my intent to walk part of the pilgrimage route from León to Santiago de Compostela in the northwest of Spain sometime this spring, he was at once interested in being part of it. No one else was, but, all in all, I guess I'm neither surprised nor very disappointed - very few people see these long-distance walks as having any merit at all!

This one may have appeared a bit more daunting, too - in a sharp departure from my earlier walks, there is little planning to be done in the way of reserving lodging or meals - pilgrims just take it as it comes, and we came at it as pilgrims, not knowing exactly what to expect. One harbinger was the website that said "No te preocupes cuando no tengas comida o cuando no encuentres techo, simplemente camino - El camino te provee."  and later "Si su sufre, es parte de ese camino interior del que aprendemos." - "Don't be concerned if you don't have food or when you don't find the way straight and easy - the way will provide for you, [and] if you suffer, it is part of that internal way from which we learn"!

One obstacle we hadn't figured on was the cost of airfare - in years past, travel in May has been reasonable, and with the state of the world and the economy, I figured tickets this spring would be at bargain levels. That turned out not to be the case, and we were fortunate to find a two-day sale of tickets from Houston to London (via Detroit) for $365 round-trip, then tack on to that a $160 round-trip fare from London to Madrid, allowing us to spend a day in London on the way back as a bonus.

We set ourselves the secondary goal of traveling with only carry-on luggage, so we perforce abandoned pocketknives, walking sticks, the U-Dig-It poop scoop, even my first aid mini-scissors (they have points). I even replaced the aluminum backstays in my pack with a piece of plastic cut from a rose trellis. As a result, I was carrying about 19 pounds, Stanley somewhat less, so that was a good thing.

• The Camino de Santiago has existed since the tenth century, Santiago being supposedly the resting place of the bones of James bar-Zebedee, supernaturally transported from the Holy Land. The "discovery" of the bones roughly coincided with the beginning of the Reconquista of Spain from the Moors, or, as one website puts it, "Spain at this period sorely needed a new champion or focus to inspire Christians against the invading Moors. The rediscovery came therefore at a most propitious moment." You can also find on the web a fuller history and an interesting commentary from one pilgrim.
• This map shows one of the many paths, the so-called "French route", which is by far the most commonly-walked. We did the part in red, about 300 km (195 mi). Most of the pilgrims we walked with had started at St Jean Pied-de-Port, on the French side of the Pyrenees, a walk of some 780 km (480 mi), so we were joining them when they were some three weeks along.
• There were also some bicyclists, one of whom, a retired engineer, had started in Munich and ridden 2650 km (1650 mi). He said that his atlas showed Munich at 500 m and Santiago at 200 m, so he figured (jokingly) the whole trip was only 300 m downhill by the book, but his cycling computer (fitted with an altimeter) recorded ups and downs, and by the time he had biked through Bavaria, the Austrian Tyrol, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, southern France, the Pyrenees, and the Picos de Europa, he had climbed (and descended the same) 30 000 m (100 000 ft) - more than three Mount Everests. Whew!

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