The Night Train

We left Santiago last night, after a day of shopping and looking at the sites. I´m not sure if this is the usual way to end a pilgrimage walk, but we took the train from Santiago to Madrid leaving at 10:33 pm and arriving at 8:30 am.  That´s right…we spent the whole night on the train!!

We slept in a little room with four bunks in it.  We were glad that our bunk mates were our friends.  It was a bit like the world´s smallest alberge.

I think that all of us (in our cabin anyway) had the best sleep of the whole trip.  The swaying of the train and the clack clack clack of the wheels on the rails brought  sleep to us rather than us needing to look for it.

We arrived in Madrid, having slept well, but, I think all of us will be looking for some more rest in the days to come.

Flying Fire

No pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela would be complete without being part of the daily pilgrim´s mass.  This mass takes place at noon every day.  Sunday´s, when some of our group attended, seems to be the busiest. Our mass today had about two-thirds of the people that yesterday´s had with all the same pomp, ceremony, and of course, fire.

We actually had two church services today.  Our group was able to arrange for a space to have an end of pilgrimage eucharist service.  The amazing thing was that the cathedral offered the crypt of St James as the space for the service. During the day this space is closed and pilgrims can look down a long corridor to see the big silver box theat sits on top of the tomb.  We were allowed to have our service right in the crypt.

Our church this morning

The ten of us gathered, and our leader and pastor in vestments provided by the church along with the bread and wine, led us in a moving concluding service.  We sang, prayed, shared the peace, and even cried a bit. We were and are a community.  It was great.

Two hours later, we were back to gather with likely more than a thousand others to celebrate the pilgrim´s mass in the main part of the cathedral.  A nun started the service about ten minutes before twelve by teaching us the latin songs that would be part of the service.  We did not understand most of the words but did feel a sense of community with all of those who had experienced what we had in the past weeks.  Again we joined in the communion meal, this time served to us by  a nun.

The highlight of the service is the lighting and swinging of the incense.  A huge censor is lit with coals carried into the church. Incense is added by

Here it is

the priest and then it is set to swinging over the crowd by eight men pulling on the ropes that run over pulleys way up at the top of the church.  The burner makes an arch that is likely 120 feet long and reaches heights of  about sixty feet.  It is amazing to see.

Now our walk is truly done.

We later spent some more time in the church, moving from chapel to chapel. The building is about 1000 years old in places.  It is hard to imagine how the builders put it there without the use of the sorts of equipment we have today.

We take a train to Madrid over night tonight. We will do some shopping tomorrow and then get on a plane for the last leg of our pilgrimage.

We Arrive

Today we finished the walking part of our pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela.  Traditionally the pilgrimage begins as you leave your door at home (this means that our´s included part of a church congregational meeting) as is over when you return to your door.  We have a few days yet before we get back home, but, we are pretty sure that the toughest part is over.

We staggered into the city of Santiago today, six hours after leaving our alberege and covered 21km.  This is a city of almost 100,000 people and it has grown out from the old city which houses the cathedral.  From the outskirts of town to the cathedral at the center was the longest 4km of the trip.  Coming down out of the hills, seeing the city spread before us, we were baffled that we could not see our destination. So we walked, and walked, and walked following one Camino pointer after another.

Ultimately we made it.  As we came to the city, we saw fewer and fewer pilgrims in the busy streets. We actually felt a little out-of-place after weeks of seeing mostly pilgrims and a few farmers.

Our Goal....The Camino ends here.

We were really ready to be done.  In all the metaphors that I see in this trip, this is one that I wonder about.  If the pilgrimage is a metaphor for life´s journey, do we indeed anticipate more and more the arrival at its destination as we get older? The other bit that fits as well is the entrance into the city with it´s bustle and strangeness as we near the end as a metaphor for that last stage of life that is often, in our culture, travelled in an atmosphere of bustle and strangeness as we spend those days in homes for the aged and hospitals, not among the regular pilgrims with whom we have shared the journey so far.

A little morbid coming to the end.  Adrenalin brought us the last km.  We have our certificates. We have reached our goal. We are changed, but are not sure yet what we have learned from the experience.

Tomorrow, we will attend the pilgrim´s mass.

Dona nobis pacem

Early in the planning for our walk of the Camino de Santiago, it was thought that song might be a part of our journey as a group.  JD, one of the members of the group took it upon herself to make a song book for the trip.  The book included some songs particular to the Camino, mostly in French, as well as a number of well-known Christian hymns and praise songs.  The little book has about 35 pages and has not been used all that much.  We did use it for the Eucharist Service we had a couple of weeks ago and a couple of days later JD, J and I did spend part of an afternoon singing from the book.

For me the song Dona nobis pacem (Latin for “Grant us peace”) has become part of the walk.  I´m not sure that I had ever sung it before.  It is a simple song (the title is all the words) and can be sung beautifully as a round.  Three of us sang it that way as we left the Fenix alberge and since then it has rolled around in my head, coming out as a hum or whistle, sometimes even with the words.

Till today, I did not know what the words meant, they were just sounds to go with the music.  Wikipedia solved that, and I find myself thinking that these words are a wonderful theme for our walk on the Camino.  Grant us peace, peace with the walk, peace with ourselves, peace with each other, peace with the direction of the journey (both in a big and small sense), peace with God´s leading, peace.

For the past 2 weeks virtually no other tune has come out of me.  What is the message in that?  Is there something I should learn here?

A Shorter Day

We march on….

Today we covered 15km from Palais de Rie or Melida.  Again we walked lots of hills, saw lots of people, and arrived not quite as tired as yesterday.  It looked like it would rain for much of the day, but never did.  The air was cooler.

Melita Sapin

We are staying in a municipal alberge tonight.  The place has over 200 beds but is set up in such a way that you really don’t notice that it is so big.  the area that we are sleeping in is also the home, tonight, for a group of high school aged kids, their teacher and an ESL teacher who happens to be Canadian from New Brunswick.  They have a lot of energy that we hope wears off at about 8:30.

Yes, 8:30. We have been getting to bed, most nights, before 9:00, falling asleep within minutes to be ready to walk again by 7:00 the next morning.  7:00 may seem early, but if you want to complete your walk before the heat of the day hits, you just need to get going.  Walking early is a little quieter and a little less crowded.

We have about 50 km left to go.  Feet continue to hurt but we will persevere.  The end is not quite in sight, but closer.  I think our entire group is starting to feel the walk and all are anticipating the end.  Others that we meet seem to be quite the opposite, not wanting the experience to be over.

It takes all kinds.

25k Today, It Feels a Bit Like Giving Up

Today was a tough day. 25km in hot weather up and down hills that are starting to look all the same with more and more people on the way. We ended the day 63km from Santiago and we start to wonder why we are doing this.  We have walked over 200 km and, I guess like any big project, at some point you may say is the end worth it.  Do we really carry on to finish this thing.  We will but……

Our feet are sore, the sun was tough. At the end of the day it rained, but J and I were safe at our alberge by then. The rest our group was not.  We have yet to see what sort of humour they are in.

We passed this marker today. Every half km they count our way...like birthdays

The excitement of the new landscape that we had at the beginning of the trip is gone.  Every km gives us more of the same, hills, old houses, rock fences, gardens and cows.  The increase in the number of people on the road is decreasing the lure of the trail.  It has also become somewhat more commercial.  Today a woman at a cafe refused to fill our water bottles and forced us to pay 2.5 eruos for a liter of water.

The metaphors keep coming..

Tomorrow will be a new day, hopefully with a new perspective on life, the trail, our feet, and the weather.

Just 63 km to go!!

The Path Fills

This is the day that we passed the 100km marker. Some nice German pilgrims took our picture at the momentous marker.  I’ll add the picture after we get home since we are still stuck using internet cafes to be able to communicate. This one is 1 euro for 24 minutes.

The atmosphere on the Camino changed today.  As noted in the last post, you must walk the last 100 km to receive the certificate at Santiago.  This has more than doubled the number of pilgrims on the trail and changed the type of person we are seeing as well.  The trail seems noiser, there is more garbage along the route and there are a lot of people not carrying sbackpacks or at least carrying small ones.  The level of commercialism has gone up as well. Commercialism here is actually quite low, nothing like Niagara Falls, but the number of cafes and refreshment stands has gone up as have the prices at these establishments.  Where the prices are not up the quality and quantity supplied is lower than it was.

I guess it is just human nature to do as little as possible to receive the prize and to take advantage of a flood of people carrying money right past your door.

Last year some 270,000 people finished the journey, mostly in the spring and summer months.  If 180,000 of them did it during that time and walked 20km/day there would be 50 people on every km of trail.  Today we saw that sort of concentration.

With it all, we still walk mostly alone, just J and I. Sure we see people ahead and behind, but their Camino is theirs, and ours is ours.  A little like life. While we live with others around us all the time, each one of us walks the trail of life on our own.  We help each other along the way, but each of us walks a unique journey.

Resting

Today we stayed in Sarria.  A number of people have told us that having a rest day is important.  No surprise really. Doesn’t God prescribe one every seven days? His reasons are much the same as those who see the need to stop walking on the Camino.  You need a chance to heal from the travelling of the past, both mentally and physically. It also is a good time to regroup as a community, to share experiences, and to look to the future.

We are 111.5 km from the completion of this adventure.  To earn the Compestella at the end we must walk the last 100km.  Note the word walk. To truly earn the reward there can be no taxi rides. It must be accomplished by our own physical strength.

The alberge fireplace

Today was a good rest. We walked a little bit in the town, looked at the tower and a convent, but mostly we rested.  J’s feet are looking a lot better. I continue to pop Ibuprophin to keep the swelling in my Achilles from recurring.  Every once in a while the pain shows up, but so far, not strong enough to stop the progress.

Today´s alberge

Our alberge is actually a nice place to rest with a wonderful rose garden, an open outdoor/indoor fireplace, and a cool spot just to rest and read.

Tomorrow we journey on.

Sarria

Today, half of our group traveled directly from Triacastilla while the rest took a route that is supposed to be less onerous, but longer, through the town of Somas and past an old monastery there. It is now almost 5:00 pm and the second half has not yet arrived at the alberge.  We, those on the shorter route, have been here since 2:00. The other group will have likely had the bigger adventures.

Our trip was onerous, but no more so than yesterday.  We went up 250 meters and then came down 600.  We did have some of the loose washed out steep pieces, but not as many as yesterday.  The views again were spectacular.

We watched the landscape change again.  In the hills, the farms are very small, steep, and appear to be struggling.  As we came into the valley that we are in now, there seems to be some more prosperity, fields are bigger, and there is more diversity.

One neat feature is the churches.  A village often appears to be little more than a couple of farms and maybe the extended family of those people, but each one has a church. One we passed by today was right behind a dairy barn.  It had two benches, and all the other bits that your would expect to find in any full-sized church, right down to a confessional that was a four-foot long bench with a two foot high screen in the center. Spain continues to be the most Catholic country in Europe.  Today is Sunday, and all the stores in downtown Sarria are closed.

The church just down the street from our alberge

Tomorrow we will rest here.  This city is the one where many pilgrims begin their journey, so we have been warned that it will be a busy place.  We are 111 km from our destination. To earn the Compestella certificate at Santiago de Compestella you must walk a minimum of 100km making this city a starting point for many.

We are moving slowly. J’s feet are still an issue and the steep rough surfaces seem to be hard on one of her hips. We continue to move though and are determined to finish as planned.

As we walk we find metaphors for life in the landscape around us, the people we meet and the situations in which we find ourselves. More on these in a future post.

Suffering from Internet Withdrawal

So its been a couple of days since we have been near a working computer. Two nights ago, our alberge had computers, but a storm the previous night had knocked them out.  Last night the medieval Glacian village we shared with well over 150 pilgrims had one pay for use computer in the whole place and it too was broken.  One of the little shops had a computer which was usually the cash register, but was being used by the attendant to shop for a used car, I almost had a break down

Today’s alberge has free internet.  I should likely not use more than twenty minutes now and maybe sneak back in the middle of the night.  Our own computer is still adding about a pound of wasted weight to my pack.

We have had a couple of the most spectacular days so so om the Camino.  The walk up toO Cabreiro was spectacular.  We climbed 600 meters over the ten kilometer walk, with mountains all around covered in green, and little villages below looking like little toy towns.  The village that we stayed in was a real tourist stop with all the expected trappings.  We emerged from the last of the up hill into a parking lot with a tour bus in it.  This village has the oldest church on the route as well as a restored medieval Galatian home, and of course the requisite tourist shops.

We slept in a municipal alberge with 48 other people in the room. Bonus was that J and I got adjoining bunks and could zip our sleeping bags together.

Today we climbed back down those 600 meters. Not as easy as going up as the trail had recently been washed out by heavy rains leaving a lot of loose stones (and not round ones) in the path. My feet are doing well, J is struggling a bit.

We have now walked 140 km. Mostly still having a good time.

Ahhhh….now I feel better