Camino Fever

This is the start of several postings covering my first experience walking part of the Camino de Santiago this past week. Each post will cover one day of my journey.

Monday, September 22, 2008.
From Sarria to Portomarin.
approximately 25 kilometers (15 1/2 miles)

Walked out of our piso at 8am, not quite daylight on an overcast morning. A little past 8:30 I boarded a train at a station across the ria from our neighborhood. Fortunately, the train to my starting point, Sarria, goes by the closest station to our house. The clouds splattered the train with bits of rain as we entered deeper into the Galician countryside. At times it seemed like the mist and the forest conspired to swallow the train whole - this sensation was puncutated when we actually entered into tunnels. After arriving a little late to Sarria I found my credential after three stops and was finally on my way shortly before noon. (If you walk more than 100km of the Camino you have a 'credencial del peregrino' - a sort of passport that you must get stamped twice a day to prove you walked the distance. When you arrive in Santiago, you present your credential and recieve a 'Compostela' - a certificate confirming the completion of your camino.)

The day was harder than I imagined. I was very tired and sore quite early in the walk. The going felt slow, and I felt off-schedule from how I planned things in my head. I found taking breaks and eating food to be difficult this first day. God provided for me anyhow, when some fellow pilgrims shared some of their home-made empanada with me, and then when I joined three young spaniards for a portion of the walk. They were university students, and were very friendly and out-going. This was the beginning of the trend that carried me through the rest of the week - most of my community on the camino was with Spaniards - which was also a blessing. It provided me with a precious opportunity for extended practice, it grew my confidence in my skills, and it allowed me to grow in my cultural knowledge as well.

The walk the first day really reminded me many times of northwest Illinois, where my Dad grew up on a milk farm. The landscape was lush and green, dotted with fields of corn, wheat, and cow pastures. Plenty of the familiar black and white mottled milking cows were around, as well as tractors and farming equipment. The main differences were found in the size of the fields, herds, farms, and the structure of the houses and farm buildings (stone here vs. wood).

Of my five days of walking, this first day had the steepest ascending and descending. It was a long day, and I finally arrived stumbling into Portomarin somewhere between 6 and seven in the evening. I felt like I had zero energy, and could hardly believe I actually made it after such a long and hard day. I hauled myself to the showers, and realized after I was freshly clean that I was really cold - really, really cold. I put on as many layers of clothes as I could and retreated into my bunk. I was able to conjure up a blanket from the staff, but spent more than two hours both shivering with the chills while feeling really really hot. I realized at this point that I had a fever and had been likely walking for most of the day with this growing illness. I had no energy, and could hardly get out of bed. Finally after what seemed like an eternity, with the help of some Ibuprofen I brought for muscle pain, I was able to crawl out of bed and make it over to a restaurant for a little food.

I wrote in my journal that it had already been nothing like I imagined. If I were to learn anything from this journey, my first day showed me that as a mirror to the journey of life, the camino showed me that things can be hard and difficult, and that above all, it takes hard work. It takes willpower to go on even when you feel like you have nothing left.

Regrettably, I did not take any photos on this first day. It was probably the most remote portion of the camino I walked, and was quite pretty. It did threaten rain all day (but never did rain), and that combined with my focus on finishing kept the camera in my bag. Stay tuned for photos from other days.