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

we could have found just about any genre of food we wanted in a city the size of León yet still ended up having bocaditos (very small bocadillos) for breakfast and another bocadillo for lunch.
    The wild goose chase all over Ponferrada following signs for McDonald’s (the closest we came to finding it was a homeless guy with a bulbous red nose and shoes that were much too large).
    Drinking two glasses of wine in one sitting (as a person who generally despises wine but has dedicated his life to consumption of beer and other barley-related products, that was roughly equivalent to putting back eighteen Coors Lights on just a rink burger and seven salt and vinegar chips).
    Actual bacon and eggs for breakfast in an actual restaurant in Arzua.
    Now, for a serious discussion about alcohol, also known as “one of only two things that kept us going through the tough times, along with meeting people who were feeling even worse than us”. As I mentioned, wine is huge in Northern Spain being, as it is, “wine country” and all. A term that generally refers to areas of gentle hills, small trees and people passed out drunk in playgrounds at 9 am. In fact, there was even one spot, Monasterio de Irache just outside Estella, that sported a “fuente de vino”, which translates roughly to “place for tired and already hung over pilgrims to drink free wine way too early in the morning”. Despite my earlier braggadocio and occasional attempts to join the club, so to speak, we never really did fully jump on the wine bandwagon, which meant my teeth never did achieve that pleasing purple colour so many others sported proudly. The benefit, though, was a chance to dole out the unused wine from our pilgrim’s meals like benevolent prohibition smugglers, which always led to an exciting, albeit short-lived, spike in our popularity.
    More up my alley, as always, was the beer, also a very popular beverage in Spain. Mind you, I think I can count on one hand the number of places we’ve been around the world that are not really into their beer (Islamic countries, France, and Saskatchewan’s home-made wine district come to mind). A slight oddity, though, were the three distinct sizes it was served in. There was my usual pick, the “jara”, which means jug and is usually a pint or slightly more, and is always the largest they have to offer. The middle one is called a “caño” and could be served in anything from a small squat whisky glass to a tall skinny canister called a “tubo”. Even when I asked for a jara I often ended up being given a “caño” anyway, along with a skeptical glance to let me know they really didn’t favour the chances of a guy like me handling a jara all by myself. It was the last size, however, that surprised me, called a “caña”. It was usually served along with tapas (or pinxtos) and only amounted to about a third of a regular beer. For a seasoned beer drinker slash frequent embarrassment to his family like myself, this hardly seemed worth the effort of getting the bartender’s attention, let alone bothering to get up and attempting to walk all the way to the bar without getting spanked in the crotch by Spaniards describing mundane daily occurrences with loud proclamations and wild hand gestures. On the other hand, that warm and flat final bit you always have to force down when drinking jaras, or schooners, to use the Canadian term, are a thing of the past in tapas country.
    An alcoholic concoction which became popular among our group of friends was something one of the girls coined the “Pilgrim’s Spirit” (also known as the only thing standing between a pilgrim and a deranged outburst over long farmacia lineups). Now, surely they weren’t the first people to ever think of combining booze and hot chocolate, but it sort of seemed that way at the time. Part sugar, part alcohol, part warmth, part soothing painkiller and artificial motivation, the Pilgrim’s Spirit is surely responsible for countless kilometres of hiking that seemed unlikely to ever happen, not to mention some seriously hot make-out sessions.
    Probably the only beverage more popular than that bevy of mind-altering treats was that global icon of pep and somehow getting people to work on time, coffee. A conservative estimate would be that over 70% of all Camino pilgrims were dedicated coffee-philes with very strong opinions as to favourite flavours, temperatures, caffeine levels, milk temperatures and bowel stimulation properties.