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

experience a bond with the people you experience it with. I think everyone had a unique experience but we all miss the journey. As I reflected upon arrival in Santiago November 6 th , 2012:
    Man do my feet hurt! It has been an amazing journey and exceeded all expectations. This pilgrimage has too many metaphors and life lessons to share in one page, but I will share one. On the third day I stopped at a church and met a nun who gave me a copy of the pilgrim beatitudes. The gist of which is that we are here to care for one another and the Camino begins after you leave Santiago. We are all pilgrims in life. We do not need much but we need each other. That was I think the biggest surprise for me. I thought this was going to be a solitary journey. But the opposite happened. I hope this pilgrimage has made me a better person. To my fellow pilgrims, it is hard to integrate back into our lives as we are all going through Camino withdrawal. Always keep the Camino in your heart, and stay in touch!!!!

Laynni Locke
    Canada
    Misgivings
    I had first heard about the Camino about 12 years ago when a co-worker’s husband did his pilgrimage and I immediately thought "That's ridiculous. Why would anyone ever want to do that?" Over the next several years it came up occasionally and my attitude changed very little. However, as we did more and more hiking we realized the Camino has aspects to it that are unusually desirable - particularly that it is essentially hut-to-hut hiking, that there are lots of restaurants and cafes along the way and the reported camaraderie. I had realized a while ago that while backcountry hiking can take you through amazing scenery that you can't otherwise reach I was not a fan of carrying my food and accommodation on my back. When we started travelling more extensively about 5 years ago I began looking into the Camino again and came to the conclusion that we had missed our chance and that it was already too popular now with horror stories of overcrowding. The thought of the albergues filling up and not being sure of having a place to sleep at night was literally abhorrent to me - I tend to panic when I don't have a reasonable surety about details like that which makes being around me less than pleasant, or so I am told. But then we watched the movie 'The Way” and the discussion came up again, along with a random comment regarding the concept of hiking in a shoulder season. And so started the research.
    I used my favourite research tool - reading other peoples' blogs - and was able to see that October seemed to be reasonable for weather and was definitely quieter. However, we already had a trip planned for the fall - the Tran-Siberian railway starting in Moscow and ending in Beijing with a stop off in Mongolia to ride a pony and stay in a yurt and finishing with a couple more months in China in various locations that were as yet to be determined. So I looked into March which looked possible though with significantly sketchier weather. That summer, just before we bought our flights, Dean had what can only be described as a hissy fit and decided that if Russia, Mongolia, and China were going to make it that difficult for us to get visas for them then they weren't going to be getting our money. And immediately, our plans changed. Suddenly it was possible to go during what was, to me, a more desirable time period.
    But even once we were officially going I still had a few concerns:
    I am not a dorm kind of girl. I go to great lengths to avoid staying in a dorm and when I have had no choice I didn't particularly enjoy the experience. It was not the shared bathrooms so much as people disturbing my sleep, especially drunken idiots coming back in the middle of the night.
    I couldn't quite get my head around the concept of hiking that far, especially knowing that we would have to average 25 km a day when our previous longest hike in one day, ever, was 24 km in Scotland which we described at the time as 'epic' before collapsing for several days. I think that because we had done some hiking before we were more aware of the enormity of what we were taking on and all the things that could go badly than many of the people who started the Camino with us.
    Boredom. I knew that walking for that many days was going to be monotonous. The longest we had hiked before that was for 10 days in Nepal and I remembered how happy I was to be done. How would I react to three times that length? How would we pass the time for all the