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

of course, there is always more than enough white bread to go around, which we would casually use to mop up pork grease while engaging in a lively conversation with the rest of the table about what body part hurt most today.
    Some of the albergues offered communal dinners that often turned out to be among the best meals of the trip. Besides the convenience of eating in the very same place that you scrub down and pass out, communal meals are a great way to meet people, tend to be quite fun and boisterous and occasionally give you a chance to find out things about your fellow pilgrims besides the current state of their calf muscles or how much they hate the sun.
    Even if they didn’t offer communal dinners, most albergues still had communal kitchens hungry pilgrims could use to whip up their favourite comfort food, patch together a cheap evening meal or pee in the sink if the queue for the bathroom became unmanageable.
    Madeline’s Take
    The traditional diet while walking the Camino can leave a person wanting. You know, for things like vegetables, or whole grains. Or really anything that is isn’t salami, cheese, dried out white bread, or jam. Let me give you a brief look at a standard day’s sustenance.
    Most places offer breakfast for a few extra euros. Traditionally toast. Or the leftover bread from last night’s dinner toasted, served with margarine and some sort of preserve. There is also usually cafe con leche, thank god, and some sort of juice. Often there are also pre-packaged sweet cakes in various forms but a standard low quality smattered around the tables free for the picking up. You see breakfast is usually a “buffet”. Meaning you can have as much toast as you would like to bone up for your 5-6 hours of hiking that day.
    Because I metabolize this hearty meal in about two hours lunch usually comes pretty early on the Camino. Around 10 am we usually wander into the first cafe we find where I am usually faced with a tough choice. At almost every stop bocadillos are available to satisfy a pilgrims hunger. Don’t be fooled by their cute name. They usually resemble an entire baguette cut down the middle, with a few slices of ham, salami, or chorizo. Sometimes you can add cheese. And that is it. Clearly a balanced meal.
    Dinner can be a variety of things. But normally Spanish eat a lot later than really fits with the pilgrim schedule. Waiting until nine to eat doesn’t work so well when you go to bed at ten. Because of this some restaurants open early for pilgrims menus. This is usually a three course meal that typically includes the following:
    First course (a choice of):
    Pasta with red sauce
Soup of some form.
Ensalada (iceberg lettuce, tomato, onion)
    Second course:
    Some sort of fried fish with fries
Pork with fries
Beef with fries
Meatballs….. with fries.
    Dessert:
    Yogurt
Ice Cream bars
An apple or banana
Pre-packaged flan.
    Of course, bread is served with every meal. And wine. Every night. Every night the same.
    I try and fit in a banana when I can.
    Some of our food highlights:
    Pinxtos in Pamplona (they are really just tapas with a cooler name).
    Making our own chicken stir fry in Puente la Reina (with lots of rice and no less than four chicken breasts for some reason).
    Had my first Spanish paella at the American Café in Estella (basically fried rice with a few vegetables strewn about for colour).
    Fifteen person meal in a courtyard outside the cathedral in Los Arcos (followed by nearly getting trampled in the grocery store when it finally re-opened at 7 pm).
    The beef lomo (type of cut) in La Viana that was so thin that if I held it up and looked through it like a magnifying glass I could just about make out Laynni being embarrassed by me.
    Having a taxi driver take us to Pizza Hut in Burgos on a Saturday night (where the Domino’s Pizza we found confused all involved until we later learned Domino’s had bought out all the Pizza Huts in Spain) where we enjoyed an unbelievable €6 all-you-can-eat special along with every teenage boy in the city looking to fill up cheaply before heading out for some serious underage drinking.
    The terrible hot dog I bought outside the Burgos cathedral, followed by an equally terrible doughnut.
    The excellent beef stew in Hornillos (stew being far less popular in Spain than large swathes of preposterously dry bread).
    The big night of drinking and huge “American” burgers at a pub in León playing big screen videos of AC/DC and Abba.
    The way