Final Reflections:
1. Planning & Packing – It is truly amazing how little you need to travel the Camino with. This isn't just about the weight of your pack, although that is certainly a great motivator to culling through your things as your journey proceeds. You literally need very little on the Camino. I carried three sets of socks and underwear, plus three t-shirts. Washing my clothes daily meant that I could easily have made do with two of each. I had one pair of walking shorts, plus a pair of ultra light shorts to change into at the end of the day.
2. Training & Preparation - Unless you belong to a walking club that tours the world, you will be unlikely to have trained for every type of terrain that the Camino will toss at you. Steep ascents and equally steep (or steeper) descents, paths that are little more than washed out streams, narrow paths running between steep embankments that you often have to share with a herd of cows, the Camino has all of this and much more. The joke about the Meseta (the vast flat plains in the middle of the Camino) is that you will see a tree on the horizon and two hot and dusty hours later it is still on the horizon! The good news is that you will, like most who have walked before you, handle each of these in stride. Walk the Camino at your own pace and you can do it.
3. Mental Preparation.... The Camino is, after all, a pilgrimage, a time for reflection. It is not a tourist trip through Spain. You need to be mentally prepared for long bouts of reflective thinking. You need to be prepared for long periods of being alone with your thoughts. This can be good, or not so good. I found my thoughts often reflecting on my marriage and my family. On how I was blessed to have both and wondering (if ever so fleetingly) how I had deserved such blessings.
4. People – Walking the Camino is about people, if nothing else. It is about meeting people and establishing relationships with those with whom you will often have little in common. Including language. My fondest memories of my Camino are the people I met and the times we shared.
5. Cyclists.... Increasingly there are people who do the Camino on bicycles. Often they are on the roads that sometimes parallel the Camino. However, many who ride mountain bikes will take the trail itself. None that I encountered had or used a bell on their bike. Almost all race down the trail expecting you to know of their approach and jump our of the way. Sharing the trail to many of them simply means that walkers give way to them. So, beware!
6. The Camino – When all is said and done, there were aspects of the Camino I found disappointing, or sad. The annual numbers of peregrinos now tops 140,000. With that, our modern material world is slowly taking over the Camino. I don't mean cellphones, although rare was the person I encountered without a cellphone or iPhone. No, I mean our modern world's propensity for trashing our surroundings. Too often, walking the Camino, I came across empty water bottles, drink containers, power bar wrappers, and even soiled bathroom tissues. The Camino is an ancient and honoured pilgrimage route. Unfortunately, too often for many of those you meet along the way today's Camino is just a cheap holiday.
Walking the Camino you almost get the feeling that you're in another world. It is not, as some would say, a return to simpler times. You cannot escape the modern world on the Camino. And I think to try and use the Camino for this purpose is to misunderstand it. It's a reflective journey that forces you to reconnect with the world around you, not to escape it. It forces you to reconnect through the people you meet and friendships you gain. It's learning more about the world through the people who live here.
Would I walk the Camino again? It's a question many friends have asked. When I completed the Camino, I was glad to have done it. I had no thoughts of doing it again. I wasn't even sure that, if asked, I would suggest to someone that they should do it. Now, a number of weeks after completing it, I am less sure. Having completed the Camino, I feel that it is still with me. I feel that I more fully understand some of the people I had met who were doing a second or third Camino. You finish your walk, but I'm less sure that you ever finish with the Camino.
Would I walk the Camino again? To be perfectly honest, I don't know. But it wouldn't be anytime soon :-)
