Santiago De Compostela

Yesterday, we walked to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. The end of our Camino.

We did it!

479 miles of walking. Over mountains, across plains. Through vineyards and cornfields and sunflowers. Through industrial parks, past factories, around airports, next to junkyards. In tiny quaint villages and abandoned housing developments and drab suburbs and bustling cities. We slept in old palaces and in monasteries and in dilapidated buildings on sagging bunkbeds. We met animals and smelled flowers and walked through heat and rain and hurricane-force wind and snow.

So what did it all mean?

A few days ago, we had a long conversation with an albergue owner who had done the Camino three times - in his teens, twenties, and early sixties. He lamented the changes he’d seen over the years — the services and amenities available to pilgrims are more plentiful now, but he said too many pilgrims are too prescriptive about where they must stop and what exact route they must take, as if straying off the path would somehow invalidate everything.

He also told us that people who thought they’d have some big, life-changing realization on the Camino were out of their minds. “Your life isn’t going transform,” he scoffed. “You are the same person, you just have some more time to think and be quiet with yourself. An expectation beyond that is crazy.”

While I wouldn’t be quite as flippant as he was about other people’s experiences on the Camino, I do fall in the camp of “wherever you go, there you are.” I had a vague hope that walking the Camino would help me let go of some of my anger with the Catholic Church (spoiler: it absolutely did not), but had no other goals or expectations.

And so I was surprised to come away with two lessons from this Camino. The first is that my body is capable of way more than I gave it credit for. The only “training” I did for this hike was walking around San Francisco. I’d never walked for extended periods of time with a pack before this. And I did it - for hundreds of miles. Sometimes (a lot of the time?) it was painful and uncomfortable, but I’m stronger than I thought I was.

The second lesson is that I’m more of an outdoors person than I realized. I’d always identified as more of an indoor cat, so I was surprised to be so happy just tramping around in the country, with nothing to look at but plants and nothing to listen to but birds. I even had a moment of fierce, unbridled euphoria in September, in the middle of a wild and windy rainstorm as I walked up a hill through green fields. More than once, we took an alternate path that was longer or steeper just so we could be deeper in nature and farther from the roads and towns.

Worth the hike.

The Camino also confirmed for me something that I already knew: walking is healing. I met so many people who were dealing with grief, addiction, disillusionment. Putting one foot in front of the other and measuring success simply by waking up in one town and falling asleep in another — that very physical momentum — gave people some sort of psychological momentum to keep going as well.

This morning, I waited in line at the Pilgrim Reception Office to get my final stamp and a certificate for completing the Camino. The person next to me in line turned out to be from San Francisco - we live about six blocks from each other. It was a beautiful moment of connection, a perfect way to end the Camino. To be thousands of miles from home and still be among neighbors.