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

it seemed that way since you only saw faster hikers once before they quickly left you behind and likewise with slower hikers who soon fell behind you. But usually the people you saw as you left town ended up being the exact same people you passed an hour later sitting at a bar enjoying a morning joe with their shoes off and feet up on a chair soaking up the feeble morning sun. The same people who then passed you an hour later halfway up a hill while you stripped off a number of sweat-soaked cold weather layers to pack away, at least until the next set of chilling clouds arrived. The same people who you sat near at lunch but passed because it took them so long to pick out a salami with the perfect blend of greasy entrails and inedible wax wrapping. The same people who then passed you an hour later again, nodding at you with a knowing chuckle as you emerged sheepishly from a sparse stand of spindly saplings while doing up your pants. The same people you then passed at the edge of a new town an hour later sitting on the first bench you’d seen in 20 kilometres, scouring their guidebook for directions to one of the four albergues that make up 44% of all the buildings in town, all located right on the trail. The same people standing next to you brushing their teeth after you emerge from the shower to stand at the mirror examining the day’s new crop of shoulder pimples. The same guy sleeping across from you who apparently found it too hot in his sleeping bag and is now pointing his ass directly at you in the moonlight, his threadbare tightie-whities no longer doing a thing to conceal the gloomy darkness of his ass crack.
    What is the most stunning piece of architecture on the Camino Frances?
    An argument could be made for any of the sensational Catholic cathedrals (particularly León and Burgos), the whimsical little stone churches found in the tiniest villages or the numerous medieval bridges so impressive in their durability and indifference to all that graffiti. But push comes to shove I need to go with the incredibly intricate set of stairs and crosswalk outside Astorga comparable to those found in 60,000 seat football stadiums. Even though its only purpose is to help us safely cross a set of railway tracks that are roughly two metres across and seem as lonely and abandoned as the bottom half of a stale muffin, someone decided it would behoove us to climb up, across and down approximately 150 unnecessary clanging metal steps at the end of a seven hour day. I never felt safer.
    Does everyone follow the same schedule?
    Early on that seemed to be the case, especially among the groups of English speakers who almost all seemed to be following the Brierley guide and his carefully regimented daily hiking segments. But after a week or so, right around when Brierley somewhat optimistically laid out a pair of 30 kilometre days for us to tackle back to back, folks started to stagger their routes a bit more. Around day 10 most people had worked through the worst of their ailments, having acquired useful knee braces, diligently treated blisters and dumped those ridiculous shoes with individual toes and no support whatsoever, and it was at this point that we started to see a concerted shift from mere survival to active planning. Those on tighter schedules, or experiencing less pain, or an inability to sleep past 6 am, or with longer legs, or intent on ditching the persistent Finnish guy who knows a lot about universal health care and absolutely loves discussing the downsides of Greece, you know, racially and all that, starting to outpace the guidebooks, never taking a rest day and always pushing on an extra five kilometres at the end of every day to ensure a more consistent diet of pain and suffering.
    Others, those with more or less unlimited time to finish the Camino, or who had friends behind they wanted to wait for, or who lacked the motivation to push themselves beyond the barely acceptable minimum effort, or whose bodies were falling apart at a pace that would have them wheeled into Santiago a month from then in a child’s wagon as nothing but a pile of discarded Mr. Potatohead pieces, or who were really looking forward to staying in a hotel and wandering around a strange town all day with no backpack on with their scarred and disfigured toes gazing happily out of a pair of rubber flip flops, they tended to go only as far as prescribed by “The Book”, sometimes even less, and jumped all over the idea of a rest day in