FOREWORD: I completed the El Camino de Santiago – an 800km spiritual pilgrimage across Spain in late Summer of 2009. I journalled and photographed my trip, and as a final completion I agreed to publish my journal and pictures a year to the day of my journey.

STATS: Walked 30kms (18.6 miles)

9:25pm I am in bed in this glorious cool albergue, we got the last 2 beds. My bed is right at the front door, so if anyone comes in or out of this massive room of about 50 beds, I know about. It is full on, but pales in comparison to how grateful I am to have a bed. Mum is pretty slow so we only got in at 6pm today, meaning that we were on the road for the better part of 11 hours. It was a long day, to say the least, but so beautiful. We crossed O’Cebriero and to try to put words on the beauty of this walk is impossible, from the early morning to the evening, each step was a breathtaking vista. It was completely completely spectacular. There was one point were this man was stopped and just staring and staring. He said to me he walked the camino each year purely to stand in this spot. I could completely relate, I didn’t want to move. Just to stand there for the rest of my life. I felt very blessed.

We are also starting to encounter these hilarious British tour groups, with their tiny ruck sacks and designer hiking gear, that are dropped off in the morning, to walk a couple of kilometres and get the obligatory stamps, then they are picked up by luxury air-conditioned mercedes min-buses and whisked away to five star lunches. They go home and tell their friends they walked the Camino, and they have. ANd as I walked with one lady, enjoying her purer than the queens English, and looking at my cheap wind jacket and sweat stained dusty bun bag, I could not even begin to articulate my Camino experience with hers, but it didn’t really matter, we just walked and shared each others company, for what it was.

Mum has decided not to walk at all tomorrow and get a bus directly to Sarria tomorrow, and I am pleased and excited for the walk alone. I miss walking powerfully in the morning when I am strong and rested.

I am really cherishing all the walks. It is very long and I am deeply tired but loving it. I am starting to get a sense of how profound it is, and what I have done. It is also amazing to me how I am so devoid of thought. I tried to think about *Jason* today, and I couldn’t it, it just kept slipping away. Just so much ease. Walking with mum is really interesting, and seeing how I serve another is interesting and does require a whole level of organisation and communication and compromise. I am learning a lot.

I am still meeting lovely people and having a grand time, but it is different, just a real silence growing inside me. A hatching almost. I feel extremely blessed. One awareness I had about going off the path twice and how that is a metaphor for my life. How I go off the path and the track and I lose the focus and get behind, squander my resources and then have the to really baton down the hatches and catch up, like I ran out of time by my misjudgement and I am running out of money, by going off the budget…so I am always on the back pedal. Very great awareness.

The last few hours of today were fairly intense. At our afternoon drink break, we chatted to these 2 lovely girls and they were staying at Fonfria too, where mum and I had planned to stay. While we sat there the rumours start to filter in that the albergue in Fonfria was full. I started to panic a little, knowing that at mums pace we would not get there in time to get a bed, and so every person who over took us and went ahead of us were potentially taking our beds. We quickly came to the decision that I needed to push ahead. It was fairly stressful, and getting a bed was not something I had really worried about much. So far I had always been taken care of, but once you slip into the fear based, worry consciousness, it is hard to move out of it. It is like you are declaring that you don’t trust God and therefore need to fend for yourself and fight it out for yourself. So I walked and walked and did not stop, the 2 girls were ahead of me, and I could tell that they were nervously trying to keep their lead. This awful awful race that you are pretending not to have. And it is not healthy, you need to rest, but I just couldn’t. Eventually the one girl needed to stop so I took the lead and managed to make it into the albergue about 5 minutes before them. It was awful, because I literally got the last 2 beds. If they had got there before me it would have been us, without a bed. It was really crap. They ended up getting mats in the garage, and I was really glad that I managed to get mum a bed. But it is hard because mum is so sensitive so even though she has a bed she gets a little claustrophobic. I have a feeling this is the last albergue we will be staying at.

It was a fab albergue, with a Brazilian hospitelero who I fell in love with and flirted outrageously with. We had a big communal dinner and there was an incredible lady there who was doing the Camino in a wheel chair. I cannot tell you what an inspiration she was. People are amazing.

previous day: day 34 villafranca-to-ruitelan
next day: day 36 fonfria-sarria

View Larger Map