Camino de Santiago: Reflections and Insights A Year Later

notes from the Camino Frances

Photo: Roncesvalles, Louise’s iPhone, May 2022

If you’d said to me in early June of 2022, that sitting here at the dining table, readying myself to write once more about our Camino de Santiago journey, would bring on the strength of feeling that it does, I don’t think I would have believed you.

And yet here I sit, the warmth of recollection flooding over me, and the craving to throw my backpack over my shoulders, step into my walking shoes and follow those little yellow arrows is almost overwhelming.

The Camino de Santiago is truly a magical thing and also probably the hardest thing I have ever done.

Photo: Louise’s feet on Day 3, Zubiri, Louise’s iPhone, May 2022

Let me share a little context with you, if you’re new here and don’t know our story.

We first heard about the Camino de Santiago watching a series on the BBC following a group of celebrities walking the Camino in 2018. It caught our eye and was easy viewing and it piqued Mark’s interest in particular as something he’d like to do one day. It felt like something we could do perhaps once all five of the children and step-children in our blended family had left school and were embarking on their own independent life journeys. And so we shelved it as a ‘wouldn’t that be nice’ kind of an idea.

Along came the pandemic, and then came cancer. Mark’s diagnosis of stage 3 prostate cancer in his forties left us reeling and reassessing our future plans. Suddenly ‘some day’ didn’t feel as guaranteed as it had before. As we sheltered in place at home, attempting inadequate sourdough starters and most definitely not writing a book, we discovered (rather late you might say) the escapist joys of YouTube.

In particular, we discovered Jessica Sueiro and her family who walked the Camino de Santiago with their two pre-teen and teenage children in 2018 and shared their adventures on their WorldTowning channel.

We began to realise that maybe this Camino idea was possible, and rather than waiting for our children to leave home, we could actually take them with us.

As it turned out, only two decided to join us, Henry (then 15) and Megan (then 11).

Photo: St Jean Pied de Port on day 1, Louise’s iPhone, May 2022

The Camino de Santiago, also known as the Way of Saint James, is actually a huge web of pilgrimage routes across Europe, all ending in Santiago de Compostela in Galicia in Northern Spain. The cathedral at Santiago is said to be where the apostle Saint James’ remains are buried, under the High Altar, and so for hundreds if not thousands of years, pilgrims from across the world have journeyed there.

Whilst many pilgrims make their way to Santiago for religious reasons, the Camino de Santiago has been widening in popularity more recently, partly due to films like Martin Sheen’s ‘The Way’, and perhaps also through a growing cultural focus on health, wellness and taking spiritual journeys.

Nowadays there are as many reasons for walking the Camino as there are people walking it.

The most popular, and most famous, Camino route is that of the Camino Frances, which wends its way across 500 miles (more than 800 km) of Northern Spain, starting just over the French border on the other side of the Pyrenees in St Jean Pied de Port.

This is where our Camino journey was to begin in May 2022. Little did we know, that day we left St Jean early in the morning, as we disappeared into the mists of the low Pyrenees, that we would be embarking on a journey that would change each one of us in different ways, indelibly and forever.

Not least, walking 500 miles across Northern Spain was to change the shape of my feet, permanently.

Photo: The French Pyrenees on day 2, Louise’s iPhone, May 2022

The first two days - St Jean to Refuge Orisson, Orisson to Roncesvalles - went with relatively little incident (if you don’t count the 50mph+ winds that we faced crossing the Pyrenees on day two, you can watch the YouTube vlog of that here). It was tough, but we’d deliberately split the first leg of the journey into two shorter days so that we didn’t scare off Megan and Henry too early. It was an adventure, and we were winning at life.

The third day into Zubiri grew my first and second blister, the fourth day was a painfully rocky downhill. Quickly, I went from two blisters to a whole family of blisters across both feet, as well as ankle pain caused by trying to walk on the edges of my feet and ‘off’ the blisters (obviously this approach is not to be recommended).

The first tears of the adventure were shed on day four walking towards Pamplona when the searing pain from my blisters really took hold on a long downhill. I carried on that first really hard day, only because of a wonderful Australian couple (hello Rob and Heather!) who shared empathy, compassion and blister maintenance tips. Rob also had terrible blisters but had been walking alongside a friendly Australian GP for a while who had advised him on how to treat them. (That same friendly Australian doctor had also been on hand on our arrival in St Jean a few days earlier when Megan had had a spontaneous nosebleed on the steps of our auberge. This is the magic of the Camino community). I hobbled into Pamplona later that day, hot, tearful and leaning heavily on two walking poles.

Camino blisters seem to be an entirely different breed from your normal, common blister. They are far more menacing and a thousand times more painful, in my opinion. These weren’t the sort of blisters you get from wearing silly shoes on a night out in Birmingham. The pain was constant and intense. It felt like I was walking on hot, sharp, needles.

These were blisters (alongside the related muscle pain that comes from trying not to walk on your blisters) that lasted for weeks. Over time I learnt to manage them better, but I wasn’t blister-free (relatively) until probably the fourth week when Mark developed plantar fasciitis and we swapped the walking wounded badge. On the Camino you’ll find everyone has a different solution for blisters. It’s one of the ways you bond with your fellow pilgrims. Pop them. Don’t ever pop them. Wrap them. Walk on them. In the end, a kind pharmacist in Estrella took pity on me and gave me a free needle and some iodine gel and we developed a comforting, nightly routine of popping, treating and re-bandaging my blisters.

I don’t exaggerate when I say this changed the shape of my feet. Much like the scars from giving birth to my daughter, my toes have never looked quite the same again.

Photo: Somewhere on the Camino day 6, Louise’s iPhone, May 2022.

I write this to say, the first few weeks of my Camino de Santiago were in many ways a trial of my resilience and pain tolerance. This was not fun. Each day was an exercise in pain management, punctuated by brief moments of distraction, like arriving at the Fuente de Vino, a fountain running with free red wine and a queue of pilgrims, in Ayegui, or during some of the sometimes random, often hilarious, conversations we had with Henry and Megan along the way.

We limped out of Logrono after a rest day, on day 10 of our walk, met by squirrels who were almost sinister in their over-friendliness, and by day 11, I was seriously questioning whether I would be able to finish the journey. I had been worried before we’d left home; about finding accommodation, about how Megan and Henry would cope with the distance and about how to find food they liked. I had been worried about the weight of the bags, and how hot it would be. It had never occurred to me that my biggest challenge of all was going to be my own two feet and I honestly didn’t know if they would be able to take me the full 500 miles.

I had no idea if I was going to make it.

And yet.

Each morning I got out of bed, got dressed, put on my walking shoes and stepped outside.

Photo: Sunrise outside Bercianos del Real, Louise’s iPhone, June 2022

Mornings on the Camino de Santiago are completely glorious. Walking as a family during early Summer, we had collectively agreed early on that it would be best if we started each day early, and arrived in our destination before the heat of the day. That way we could all chill out in the afternoon before heading back out for some dinner in the evening. Shower, then bed, then start all over. We were often out at 6:30am, which was later than some pilgrims, earlier than others.

Almost nothing is open at that time in the morning in rural Spain, the sun was just starting to appear as we crept out of our albergues, and teenagers were sleepy. We would walk in silence for the first hour in the cool, morning light. This was my favourite time of day. The air would smell fresh, especially as we walked later on through the eucalyptus plantations of Galicia. There would be no sound other than the crunch of our feet on the path and the dawn birdsong. Each of us would walk quietly, our focus on where our first cafe con leche of the day was going to be.

An hour or two later we’d be found, hunched around a small table outside a cafe, our bags lined up along a wall or kerb, fellow pilgrims around us, warming our hands on our first coffee of the day and a piece of tortilla, or some delicious Galician thick, white toast with mermelada.

Mark and I are generally early risers and when we take our two dogs out for an early morning walk it always reminds me of these peaceful early mornings on the Camino.

Photo: Tardejos on day 16, Louise’s iPhone, June 2022

The knack, I found, was not to think about the whole of the journey, the hundreds of kilometres we had left until the end. Each morning, I would put on my walking shoes and focus solely on the day ahead. The rest would wait. So long as I did this, I wasn’t overwhelmed by the scale of it and whether I would make it. I could do today and that was all that mattered.

The Camino de Santiago is a great metaphor for life.

By halfway through our forty-day walk, there were still tears and blisters, but I had stopped questioning whether I would make it to the end. I had come this far, and there was no way I was not going to finish. I remember one early afternoon having tears running down my face for the last four or five kilometres straight. It was almost as if all of the trauma of the previous couple of years was breaking out through my feet. I don’t know if that’s really a thing, but that’s certainly how I felt at the time.

Walking the Camino de Santiago turned out to be a deeply cathartic process. As we walked and talked with other fellow pilgrims, we met many people who were walking the path for the second, third and fourth times. In those early weeks I could not begin to understand why people would come back to do this again. I understood the sense of community, the beauty of the place, the sense of achievement and of building resilience, but I had no idea why you would come back to tread those exact same footsteps multiple times.

Photo: Santiago de Compostela, Louise’s iPhone, June 2022

Having finished our journey in Santiago de Compostela on 27th June 2022 (also our wedding anniversary) I now understand the pull to return. In fact, we did return later the same year, in October, to walk the final four days from Santiago into Finisterre, the end of the earth. This additional Camino Finisterre carries the Camino onto the coast and is a stunningly beautiful walk. When we did our full 500-mile Camino we hadn’t felt it necessary to take the extra time to the coast, and instead went to meet members of our family for a few days in Porto, Portugal, but we had lived to regret not taking those extra few days.

In fact, if you’re planning your own Camino, I would highly recommend taking a day or two in Santiago to rest and enjoy watching other pilgrims arrive and then carrying on to the coast. It was on this walk that I felt deep in my body that we had truly completed our Camino.

Photo: View of Finisterre, Louise’s iPhone, October 2022

The return to ‘normal’ life, post-Camino, is a strange and difficult one for many pilgrims and we each struggled in our own way too. Spending forty days following yellow arrows and looking for Camino shells is deeply calming and restorative. It is a simple life; get up, walk, eat, chat, contemplate, sleep and then start again. Real life afterwards felt noisy and chaotic, and those around you who you love but who weren’t a part of that journey struggle to understand the ways you might have changed.

The changes are both profound and also simple. My 11-year-old daughter left St Jean Pied de Port still a child and returned to the UK a few weeks later a teenager in maturity and outlook. Gone were certain habits from childhood, and here instead was a young woman who had walked 500 miles across Spain with a backpack on her back. She was the only one of us without a single blister and also the only one of us who had carried her backpack every single day of the Camino with no breaks. While Megan says her Camino days are done, Henry returned ready to walk another and I truly believe one day he will.

We all came back coffee drinkers too, that was new. Both Henry and Megan now had a smattering of useful Spanish words and a better understanding of the culture and geography of Northern Spain than they ever learnt through school. We were all fitter, and definitely more tanned. Not all the changes were good. Mark now had plantar fasciitis and a black toenail which took months to heal fully, and my left foot will never look the same again. I also now have a permanent itch to get back out onto the Camino and feel as if I have left a little part of myself in Galicia, my favourite part of the walk.

We have returned to Spain twice since finishing last June, and both times it felt like a homecoming.

We vlogged our Camino, primarily so that we could share the journey with family and friends back home who may never have the opportunity to do it themselves. I am so grateful that we did. Now and again I can relive our journey almost in full, and one day I hope that Megan and Henry will watch them too to remind themselves of an incredible journey they took with us before they left home and began their independent lives.

I hope that they might do the same one day with their friends, their families or even on their own. I hope that someday I will also return to walk those paths again.