The Camino experience was amazing in so many ways for Liz
and me. One of the most interesting and emotional
parts for me was bonding and interacting with fellow pilgrims.
Walking for 800 km over a period of 5½ weeks, it is
inevitable that some of your fellow travelers end up having a tremendous impact
on you. Not everyone walks at the same
speed so some folks are with you briefly and some walk more or less with you
for the whole trip.
One thing that we found is that the Camino has a tremendous
leveling effect. It doesn’t matter who
you are, what you do or where you come from, everyone is in the same boat. We all carry all of our stuff on our backs
(at least most of us), we all need to find some place to eat and some place to
sleep and we all have sore feet. One
thing that is different is that we all have a different story for why we are
walking. Most of you know that Liz and I
walked the Camino as a celebration of Liz’s weight loss and our new, healthier
life-style. I’ll try to relate just a
few of the other stories in this post.
(I’ll save my favorite ones for last!)
Some people, like us, were walking for fun reasons; others,
because they were trying to make decisions about their life. Still others had no idea why they were
walking. Even though we walked with some
people for only a short time, they still left a huge impression.
We walked for 15 minutes with a Finnish woman who was
walking slowly but steadily, carrying only some of her kit (she was having most
of her stuff transported each day to her next destination). Her family gave her the plane ticket to
France for her 75th birthday.
She was slowly walking the 800 km by herself at the age of 75! That’s impressive.
Another older German couple were walking together. He was walking the Camino for the sixth
time. His wife seemed to be carrying a
little more equipment than he and he had an unusual, stooped and shuffling
gate. As we talked more with him, it
became clear to us that he had Parkinson’s Disease. My father died of PD in 2011 so this
gentleman was pretty special to me. We
saw them on and off for about a week but we have no idea whether they were able
to make it the whole way. I hope so!
We met Ruby on the first day struggling up a steep grade
with the rest of us. Ruby is about our
age and lives in Pennsylvania. Ruby was
having a hard time keeping up with the “normal” pace of the rest of us. After the second day of walking, Ruby got to
the same albergue as us, but 5 hours later.
After the 4th day, Ruby had decided to try to continue her
walk but only travel 10-15 km each day instead of the 20-30 km most of us were
doing. We left Ruby in Pamplona and
never saw her again. She had never told
us exactly why she was walking but it seemed very important to her that
she finish. We hope that she did.
Another person from our first day was Glen from Vancouver,
B.C. Glen was very overweight with a
poorly packed backpack and it seemed incongruous that he intended to walk 800
km with no help. All he would say was
that it was “something he had to do.”
Our first real concern was when Ruby (above) arrived in the albergue
well after the rest of us and said that she had passed Glen hours ago staring
blankly into the woods. When Ruby asked
him if he was OK, his reply was “I was just wondering if I died here, if anyone
would find me.” Needless to say, Ruby
was pretty freaked out. She tried to get
Glen to walk with her but he wouldn’t.
We know that Glen eventually came in that night but we quickly walked
beyond him. Over the next couple of
weeks, we heard sporadic reports from other pilgrims that he was still walking
slowly. We think that we saw him coming
into town about 3 weeks into the trip.
If so, he must have taken a bus or some other type of transportation. We don’t know what ever happened to Glen.
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| Marie, DeeDee & Josef with Liz in Sahagun enjoying cafe con leche! |
Fortunately, most stories are happier. For example, Josef, Dedee and Marie were
three 50-something Dutch folks that we walked along with for over 500 km. We never really walked together but we tended
to stay in the same albergues and we frequented the same bars along the way for
“café con leche”. They didn’t speak much
English and we don’t speak any Dutch but we always enjoyed crossing paths a few
times every day. When we took a half day
off in Léon, we lost each other but met up again in Astorga. Unfortunately after Astorga we lost each
other and never crossed paths
again. We had hoped to see them in
Santiago but alas, it was not to be.
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| Liz with Michel (center) and Marie-Claude enjoying ... cafe con leche! |
Michel was another person that we
walked the whole way with. A French
woman about our age, she actually started in LePuy, France. LePuy is 1750 km from Santiago and one of the
more common starting points in France.
Michel started in February and finished the same day that we did. We also lost Michel in Léon and had hoped to
see her in Santiago. When we did, it was
a tearful reunion!
Frans was a Swiss man who we ended
up walking the last few hundred kilometers with. He had started in St. Jean-Pied-de-Port a few
days after we did. He was nice enough
but didn’t seem remarkable in any appreciable way; just another typical
pilgrim. It wasn’t until the last day in
Santiago that we found out that he had had a hip replacement just a year
ago. Prior to that, he could walk only
about 100 meters before he was in too much pain to continue. He was also walking to celebrate something
that he could never have even considered just a short time ago.
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| Jorg enjoying pulpo (octopus) and a good laugh |
Jorge Maas from Germany walked the
last 2/3 of the walk along with us.
Jorge is a very genial guy, always ready with a good story. Jorge is a free-lance, professional funeral
speaker. As he explained, many folks in
Germany are unchurched these days and when they die, there is no minister to
perform the funeral. Jorge fulfills that
role. He meets with the family, learns
about the deceased, prepares a eulogy and directs the service. Apparently, he is so popular that he travels
around the country and did more than 200 funerals last year, frequently 4 per
day on the weekends! Jorge needed a
break! He decided to take 100 days off
and the Camino was the first part of that.
After 100 days, he thought that people would forget about him and that
he wouldn’t be so busy when he started back up.
Besides, he would need the money after 100 days off.
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| Sam carrying the guitar |
Leo, Sam and Krisz were all in
transition. Leo had done a 4 year
apprenticeship in Germany learning to build organs. She hadn’t been able to find a job in that
field and was working as an accountant.
She decided to find a new job when she returned. Sam (20) never went to university in the UK
but went straight to work. He had
thought about joining the Royal Navy when he left school but had recently been thinking
about joining the Coast Guard instead.
His challenge was that he was a little out of shape after working at a
desk job for two years. On the Camino,
he met another Brit, Tim, who agreed to help him become a teacher of English as
a second language. That’s now Sam’s
plan.
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| Leo playing guitar in O Cebreiro with Sam (sitting at the table) |
Krisz is originally from Hungary
however, he has traveled the world, going from one job/adventure to another for
many years. Anyway, Krisz kind of fell
into the same general group of travelers as us about half-way through the
trip. He was quite an interesting
character. Most recently, he had been in
London and before that, he had been in Africa as an AIDS counselor. I never got the feeling that Krisz had many
family connections or a group of friends other than who he was with at the
moment. In O Cebreiro, our group got
together in one of the local bars and started singing songs. (You need to know that 6 members of the group
had gotten together and bought a guitar a few days earlier. A full-sized guitar! They were taking turns carrying it each day,
strapped to their backpacks.) We were
having a great time and the other folks in the bar were having a good time
listening and, sometimes, joining in.
Krisz announced that the next day was his 38th birthday and
he was inviting us to his “party”. The
next day Jacob and Michaeli decided that the group would cook a birthday dinner
for Krisz in the next town. We all
stayed in the albergue in Triacastela that night, made various sorties out to
find dinner supplies and then pitched in to make a grand dinner. When the birthday cake (a Santiago Cake),
complete with candles, came out, I thought that Krisz was about to cry. I suspect that this was the first, heart-felt
birthday party that he had had in some time.
It was a wonderful night! As I
write, Krisz is back in Kampala, Uganda working as an AIDS counselor.
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| Paul Mullen, and Krisz (with Liz) returning Liz's camera |
Guy Butterworth is one of my
favorites. Liz has written a little
about Guy in an earlier blog so I hope that I don’t repeat too much. We first met Guy in Astorga. He was staying in the same with us and one
other man. At first appearances, Guy
seems like an absent-minded professor or Barney Fife from Mayberry, R.F.D. He tends to shuffle around quickly and
misplace things. When we met him, he had
lost his winter gloves (yes, it was that cold!) and he had to go out and find
some others to buy. Later that evening,
we heard that he had purchased new gloves and then subsequently, found his old
gloves. He was happy, because his new
gloves weren’t as good as his originals.
Over the weeks, this story replayed
itself in variations over and over. In
the bar in O Cebreiro where we were having our aforementioned songfest, Guy
came in and asked us if we had seen his stylus for his iPhone. In the process of looking for his stylus, he
lost his wallet, twice! He found the
wallet but not the stylus so it was off the shops once again. A week later during Krisz’s birthday party,
Guy was distraught. He had lost the
charger and headset for his iPhone.
You’ll have to read Liz’s earlier post to find out what happened in the
end.
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| Guy, joining the party in O Cebreiro |
The other side of Guy is why he was
walking. Fifteen years ago, Guy had read
a book about the Camino and decided that he wanted to walk it when he
retired. He joined the U.K.’s
Confraternity of St. James, of which we are also members. He was working as a teacher of English in Japan
at the time. Unfortunately, when he
retired, his mother was in ill-health and he couldn’t walk at that point. Now, 15 years later, at age 74, Guy was
getting his chance. He started in St.
Jean-Pied-de-Port a couple of weeks before us and was carrying all of his own
gear. He would have his backpack packed
the night before and he would sleep in his clothes. That way, he could be out early without
disturbing others. He wouldn’t really
stop at all during the day because, as he would say, “I’m afraid that if I
stop, I couldn’t get started again!”
Even though we were all looking out for him, he was traveling
alone. Except, that is, for his wife. Guy would contact his wife at least a couple
of times a day, by text and by Skype (hence the distress about losing parts of
his iPhone kit).
Guy is just one of those genuinely,
nice people. He tends to be a little
“buttoned up” and tries to keep to himself but his goodness comes through,
anyway. He was such an inspiration to
all of us. We lost touch with him about
a week before Satiago but had heard from others that he was still plugging
along. He was the “lost” person that Liz
and I most wanted to meet up with in Santiago.
At about 11:00 a.m. on our second day in Santiago, we spotted Guy, in
full kit, across the square from the Cathedral.
What a burst of emotions as we ran across the square shouting his name! We were all in tears hugging each other. We have plans to meet Guy and his wife in New
Jersey, “Exit 8A”, when we return to the States.
My last story is about Stella and
Jacob. Of all of the pilgrims, they were
the ones that we walked with almost all the way across Spain. They started a day after us, we met them on
Day 5 and they entered Santiago the same day that we did. Jacob and Stella were the nucleus of the
group that we ended up associating with.
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| Jacob and Stella singing together in O'Cebreiro |
Stella and Jacob had walked the
Camino in 2009. They met each other
about half way across Spain and became friends.
After the 2009 Camino, they corresponded, Jacob from Indiana, Stella
from Houston, Texas. Romanced blossomed,
Jacob moved to Houston and they were now engaged. They got married May 18, two days after they
returned to the U.S. and Stella graduated from medical school two days after
that. Like us, they were walking the
Camino as a celebration – a celebration of their past Camino, their plans for
the future and their love for each other.
It’s hard to top such a beautiful story as this! They were and are loving and joyful people
who simply embraced everyone they came across.
Thousands of folks walk the Camino
every year. Each one has a story. Some walk because they need to. They are hoping to solve some major problem. We felt sorry for those folks. Chances are, they will walk 800 km and still
not find their solutions. Others, like
us, are walking as a celebration. We
felt incredibly lucky! We had no prior
expectations so everything that we gained or learned or decided was a bonus and
a blessing. A few pilgrims will “change
everything” after their walk. Some will
be disappointed. Most will rearrange
their priorities and/or make a few, small but significant changes here and
there.
None of us, however, will ever be
the same again.
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