Behind the Albergue Door: Inspiration Agony Adventure on the Camino de Santiago

seemed shocked – shocked! – at how far they had to go. To reach the first rest stop, to make it to lunch, to make it to their destination for the night, to Santiago… You could always recognize these mentally underprepared souls, usually sitting on a semi-flat rock by the side of the trail staring at their guidebook with a puzzled look on their face, before reading something that changed their expression to one of horrified disbelief, glancing down the road ahead skeptically, then looking with suspicion back the way they had come, suddenly certain that those seemingly innocent little Spanish villages were pulling one over on them. Then denial, suppression, moving on. And do it all over again tomorrow.
    Who is responsible for all those damp tissues sprucing up the edges of the trail?
    Behind trees, in small thickets of bush, around the corner of cemetery walls, under stately medieval bridges. In fact, in every single spot along the Camino that provides even the slightest modicum of privacy you can be sure to find a large collection of used tissues scattered about like tawdry white flowers by maddening women who clearly hate three things in life:
Holding it until the next town with a bathroom
Drip-drying
The ecosystem
    In fairness, each nauseating pile generally also contains at least some evidence of more graphic and disgusting issues that could just as easily be attributed to men and, in some cases, it was pretty clear why they weren’t willing to just yank up their old zip-off hiking pants and mosey off. But for the most part the obvious culprits are simply insensitive women with no concern for those following behind, although I was assured repeatedly throughout that none of the women we knew were guilty of such transgressions. Mostly because they were too lazy, but still. On the bright side, I only spotted the one used tampon, which was really only one too many.
    Are bikers born douchebags or is it something they learn as they go?
    Well, as an avid biker myself I can tell you that a good portion of it is bred into us. How else can you explain those fingerless gloves? But even so, a fair number of those that choose to bike the Camino in a mere week or ten days instead of plodding along for a month seem able to quickly achieve a whole new level of obnoxiousness on the way to Santiago. For starters, what is with the communal aversion to bells? I spend much of my time biking in the city and find the use of a bell constant and essential, even if it is a tad effeminate and pedophiliac ice-cream salesman. But on the Camino nobody has them, nobody uses them, and nobody comes around selling ice cream or offering to take photos of me trying on pants. It’s maddening. We saw a lot more bikers over the first couple weeks, probably because both the terrain and weather were more conducive to biking, and some days there was a steady stream of spandex-encased hotshots coming out of nowhere behind us to suddenly brush past our elbows, each time as startling as the time your girlfriend brought that horse whip to bed with a weird smirk on her face. Occasionally some of the more considerate bikers would announce themselves before arriving, but rarely with the simple and effective statement “on the left” spoken a good twenty or thirty metres back, but rather only once they were within one giant knobby off-road tire of using your ass as a temporary bike stand, and really loudly hollering something like “BUEN CAMINO!!” or “FROMAGE! FROMAGE!”, shocking us into spastically throwing ourselves to one side or the other, something that statistically should be a fifty-fifty proposition but sadly never seemed to work out that way.
    So, to answer the question you never actually asked, do we feel some bitterness toward people who bike the Camino? Yes, I suppose we do.
    Is there something fundamentally wrong with me if I listen to Pink’s Greatest Hits while hiking the Camino?
    I think there is something fundamentally wrong with you if you listen to Pink’s Greatest Hits at any time, whether while hiking the Camino, taking the bus to your cake decorating class or waiting for your new blonde highlights to set. At least that’s the sort of thing Laynni taunts me with. It was funny, though, we’ve never really listened to music while we have hiked in the past, probably partially because we are usually hiking together. I can see it being much more addictive when you hike by yourself. But we’d also never hiked for a month