The Road Less Taken

There isn’t one Camino de Santiago, there are many - the Camino Portugues, Camino Ingles, Camino Invierno. We are on the Camino Frances, which itself occasionally diverges into multiple routes (anywhere from 1-25 km) that take pilgrims through different towns and landscapes.

A few days ago, we decided to take an alternate path through the mountains since the main route involved walking next to a highway for 15 km. Apparently this isn’t a popular choice - we didn’t see any other pilgrims. But during this (literally and metaphorically) breathtaking route, we saw dozens of yellow butterflies, and hills tinted a delicate purple, and stunning little flowers colored a brightly saturated blue-purple. We heard the buzz of high tension power lines and smelled the fresh mountain air.

We diverted further from the alternate route to a small village, busy with farmers readying for planting. Nothing was open, but some albergue owners preparing for the season kindly let us fill our water bottles.

Then we climbed down, leaving the birdsong of the mountains for the roar of the highway as we rejoined the main route. At this point, we’d hiked 18km and 600 meters of ascent (and probably more in descent) and were in desperate need of a break.

We rolled up to a pizza place. “¿Estas abierto?” I asked. “No, we are just getting ready for the season,” replied a guy with a SoCal surfer accent. “You can come and take a rest though. Want a beer?”

The man (and his dog) turned out to be fellow Californians, and so we spent some pleasant time in the shade chatting with him and his Danish partner about America and Spain and what draws people to the Camino. The man vaguely mentioned going back to California periodically to see his kids and tend to “some businesses” he has there. Andy looked him up later and it turns out he runs a string of highly successful pizza shops/music venues and is friends with all sorts of famous musicians from the 1980s and 90s (like Dave Grohl). Wild.

On the Camino, you collect stamps from various places along the way, and the one we got at the pizza place, featuring the very cute dog, is one of my favorite:

Beers finished, we said our goodbyes and turned on to a smaller road that took us through charming villages along the valley bottom. At the last hotel in the last village in the valley, we were reluctantly given a room. There was no dinner to be had (everything was closed) so I scrounged my pack for the following “meal”

• One orange

• Half a bag of sour gummy candy inexplicably shaped like feet

• Half a bag of sweet chili Doritos

• One extremely squished emergency peanut butter clif bar

• 7 Nutella biscuits

Yesterday presented another path split. Again, we opted for the hilly route away from the road. We hiked up and down through strange dinosaur canyons, walls covered in electric moss and ferns, trees towering overhead. Farmers were busy - we saw many more tractors than cars. Most of the tractors were “unicorns” with long pointy spike “horns” on their fronts (we think for moving around hay).

Owing to some confusion I had with the guidebook, we still had another 7km to go after we rejoined the main route. It was a bit rough; after successfully avoiding blisters for so long, I started developing two on my right foot. Slowly, we walked past fat chickens and bearded goats and blossoming trees and reached the town of Sarria, where we are finally taking a day to rest.

I’m grateful for these alternate paths. They may require more work, but the payoff in solitude and scenery is worth it. I can walk along a road any day, but it’s a bit more unusual to look out over blue and purple mountains, topped with a thin layer of fluffy clouds and a brilliant blue sky or see a green and brown valley on the edge of turning purple with wildflowers. How often does hard work give you this instant of a payoff?