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

Not surprisingly, I suppose, to those with the benefit of a fully fed and functioning mind, that didn’t happen. In fact, a good part of the morning ended up being just one disappointment after another, one town or loose jumble of houses after another, while we plodded on shaky and irritable, culminating around ten kilometres out in an uncomfortable moment when I spotted a woman and her child through a screen door and, for some reason that defies logic, approached her hopefully, somehow convincing myself there was a chance that this was actually a cleverly concealed café where we would soon be fed, watered and showered in glorious bacon grease. Nope, turns out it was just her house, and she was just busy getting her kid ready for school. I can’t even pretend to know how my face must have looked to prompt her to hesitate uncertainly for a moment before cautiously offering “to find something for us”. While grateful, and impressed once again with kindness of Spanish strangers, even in my foggy haze of hunger and distress I was far too embarrassed to accept her gracious offer. Instead I redeemed myself greatly by mumbling my thanks, then accidentally slamming her door and rushing off.
    Another problem found its roots in the group dynamic. While one of the best things about the Camino was the tremendous feeling of community and abundant social interaction that took place on a daily basis - whiling away time with easy conversation, finding solace in shared suffering, revel ling in the excitement of group camaraderie - travelling in such large packs did have its drawbacks, one of which being the epic food search. I often have a really hard time deciding what I want to eat, let alone where I want to eat it or when. Put Laynni and I together and it becomes twice as hard. Put twelve to fifteen starving pilgrims of all ages, nationalities and walks of life together and send them out into a city filled to bursting with tiny cafés and cramped bars with limited, yet highly diverse, menus and you would probably have an easier time teaching a troop of howler monkeys to build your garage. Or me.
    As for the vending machines, they played a much larger part in the overall scheme of Camino life than I would have expected going in. First of all, because there were so many of them, and so many cleverly located in places where the choice of restaurants was either limited, uninspiring or mostly closed, and often all of the above. Second ly, the variety of products on offer was nothing short of astounding. Of course, they had all the usual packaged junk food one would normally expect – chips, pop, candy, chocolate bars, gum, the aforementioned knock-off Twinkies, in dozens of colours, varieties and flavours, even though when it came right down to it they pretty much all tasted just like a pencil eraser dipped in NutraSweet – and the fancier ones, usually found in the albergues themselves, were eagerly awaiting their chance to spit out several variations of coffees and hot chocolates into a tiny paper or ecologically catastrophic Styrofoam cup, piping hot and bland as a pair of khaki pants with brown loafers. But the fun didn’t stop there. Some of them had actual sandwiches, others real fruit, wet wipes, individual packets of olive oil, some offered juices with a vast array of sugar concentrations ranging from a relatively healthy 70% to diabetes-inducing 103% (these ones also featured a coating of sugar on the cap that could be sucked off the way my parents taught us to do with pennies found in the street, for luck and all), and you might even come across a meagre selection of panties, presumably to replace the ones that just kept falling off every time the bourbon came out. Even more surprising were the places that also offered a free but intentionally weak wifi signal designed, I would imagine, to entice people that would normally have returned to the warmth and communal spirit of their albergue to instead spend long periods of time hanging out in a bleak vending machine vestibule surfing the internet and chowing down on junk food and panties. Hey, colour me caught up on email and my Christmas shopping. Another variety peddled just one specific product, cigarettes, something that used to be commonplace in Canada but fell out of favour sometime in the late 80’s when we realized how bad inanimate objects were at judging the age of children jonesing for a nicotine fix. Of course, the vending machines weren’t entirely about