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

week and foolishly even started to complain about the afternoon heat, making a fair bit of noise about starting to get up earlier to avoid it. That never materialized. Then it started getting progressively cooler without me really noticing until one morning I left San Juan de Ortega in shorts and nearly froze my slender, vulnerable legs. It was a watershed moment – the last day I took my shorts out of my bag and the day I lost faith in the power of all that leg hair.
    We didn’t get our first taste of rain until Day 10. It barely lasted, and we actually referred to it as refreshing and said dumb things like “we knew it was going to rain on us sometime, it’s nice to get it out of the way” with ludicrous certainty like the two little sorority girls in a horror movie who think they’ll somehow be safe as long as they stick together. The next day it drizzled a bit in the morning before clearing right up and confirming our unfounded confidence, then we made it to Belorado just ahead of a downpour, further strengthening our conviction that we were leading some sort of charmed Camino. Then came Day 15. The Day of Revelation, as in revealing how little we really knew about the weather, and revealing exactly how waterproof our gear really was. That revelation – not too fucking waterproof. One bright spot was the beautiful sunrise as we climbed the hill out of Castrojeriz, made all the more spectacular and exotic by the dark ominous rain clouds in the background and the flamboyant rainbows that seemed almost close enough to dry hump. For the next two days numbing rain was our constant companion, damp uncomfortable clothing our clammy mistress. And as it continued unabated through Day 17 along with that weird cracking thing my big toe was doing and the way everyone we met just kept incessantly speaking Spanish, suddenly someone, maybe me, maybe someone else, wisely surmised that as humans we “need to suffer to know true happiness.” And, although there is a good chance that whoever coined that phrase didn’t have cold drops of rain slowly creeping down their ass crack every five minutes, there may have been some truth to it. One could certainly argue that it was because we were so bitterly unhappy all day long that the hotel room we found in Carrion de los Condes seemed far more thrilling than normal. Plus we got to enjoy the adventure of scampering through town with our backpack covers wrapped around us for protection from the rain (as well as fashion), then poncho shopping, then wearing those brand new ponchos back to the hotel because, let’s face it, they made a lot more sense than those stupid backpack covers. They had armholes for one thing.
    By the time we reached Sahagun on Day 20 the great weather had settled back in, albeit on average ten degrees cooler at all times, and slowly but surely over the long course of two to three hours we eventually forgot all about bad weather, and by the end of the day could no longer even imagine a scenario where it would ever be a factor again. We have photos of us leaving Calzadilla de los Hermanillos and walking the Calzada Romana, stopping for lunch on a bright, sunny and calm day wearing toques and jackets and another one that shows me with a little piece of salami on my chin. I can only imagine that July and August pilgrims who have struggled along that route under the blazing summer sun, sweating and wilting and cursing that crazily hot spot just underneath their scrotum, would literally choke on their refreshing colas to see just how different it was for us, and to learn how pleasingly moderate the temperature of my scrotum was at the time.
    Of course, rain wasn’t the only meteorological hurdle we faced. There were also the “Spiderman Skies”, as I liked to call them, on account of them being all purple and swirly and stuff just like those repetitive skies in the old Spiderman cartoons I watched when I was a kid. Although not much actually came of them, for a while they certainly appeared ominous hovering just outside Villa Manzarife, warning of coming storms, difficult times and maybe a dastardly lizard-man or two.
    Between Foncebadón and Ponferrada we were in and out of fog all day long, hidden in a grey haze one minute, emerging to a world of sunshine and annoying birds the next, before plunging back into the mist almost before we knew it. It was all very disorienting, and I must have put my sunglasses on and taken them off at least fifty times.