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

quickly since you generally need to concentrate on finding your way out of town and make sure you’re settled on the right trail. And every now and then we actually spent time in the evening outside the company of whomever we happened to be hiking with that morning. In those rare instances we could usually kill an hour or two getting caught up on everything that was missed – which restaurant we had a Pilgrim’s Menu in, how long we waited in line at the local grocery shop to purchase three bananas, whether we napped then changed our Band-Aids or changed our Band-Aids before we napped. Then we’d usually hit a bleak spot after our first rest stop as we all gloomily considered how long it was going to be now before we stopped for lunch. Then the last few kilometres before lunch typically went fast enough as we all kept ourselves absorbed in watching for tell-tale signs of our next stop appearing on the horizon – a slightly greater density of farmhouses, a barely noticeable increase in ragged dogs slinking in ditches, the faint smell of wood smoke and garlic, or maybe a sign stating the number of kilometres to the next town.
    The period immediately after lunch tended to be very hard, but less due to boredom and more because of the lethargy that comes from sitting too long and letting your legs stiffen up, the knowledge that you are exhausted and still barely halfway there, and a stomach filled with musty bread. It was generally about an hour later when our legs finally loosened up again (completely the opposite of what was happening to our bowels by that point) and our mind reached that blank neverland also known as the “afternoon doldrums” (see: Is there something fundamentally wrong with me if I listen to Pink’s Greatest Hits while hiking the Camino? ) or “questioning all the choices I’ve made in my life that have led me to this point”. But usually we just called it “iPod time”.
    Music certainly helped, although there were actually a number of different coping mechanisms people used to deal with the inevitable onset of boredom:
    Finding new people to chat with
    Games in your head
    Sexual fantasies
    Scratching
    Finding old stuff in your teeth
    Shadow boxing
    Contemplating how ugly people end up with eight kids
    Definitely, when it comes to getting through the long dog day afternoons on the Camino, make sure to keep all these great options in your arsenal, do your best to maintain a positive attitude and concentrate on relishing the beauty of nature, the freedom of the open road and the invigorating power of exercise. But make no mistake, a lot of the time you’re going to be bored as shit.
    Is the Camino safe?
    Only a fool with an excellent mob lawyer would say unequivocally yes, but I will say that it certainly never felt unsafe to me. Of course, I’m not a single woman so I was never treated to the full “Camino Flasher” experience which, I’m told, wasn’t nearly erotic as it sounds. Mostly just shock, some disgust, and maybe just a bit of lip-licking before it was time to go. Reported by an alarming number of females in situations when they found themselves hiking alone, it struck me as a relatively strange, pointless phenomenon that couldn’t possibly end in marriage, children, picket fences and happily ever after sectional couches more than, say, 40 percent of the time. Could it? Or is there a kind of wild allure to the exposed male scrotum that I’m missing? Is having a stranger’s bare penis suddenly thrust toward them one of those things women actually find irresistible, like pirates with torn silk shirts or Ellen’s dancing? Whenever I find a box of Toffifee in front of me I simply can’t help myself, I just have to start shoving them in my mouth. I suppose it could be similar to that.
    Sexually ambiguous gestures aside, probably the most dangerous scenarios we encountered along the Camino were Sundays in wine country. For that is when all the great beige hunters emerged, surrounded by packs of flea-ridden mongrels and practically invisible in their full body camouflage (right down to the sticker on their cigarette pack). Fully equipped with an impressive arsenal of shotguns and an aggravating Saturday night hangover, you certainly could not question their eagerness to kill something. Probably just some birds that look like really, really small chickens but, hey, you know what they* say, “what happens in the grapevines…”
    * “they” in this statement usually refers