Blog posts written about my first walk on the Camino de Santiago: 32

Blog posts written about my second walk on the Camino de Santiago: 0

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My second Camino was a disaster.

The route I chose was not well marked.

Not that I would have seen the trail markers–it was raining so hard I had to keep my eyes on the ground lest I slip in the mud.

I was, at least, walking a coastal route. So as long as I kept the ocean on my left, I’d eventually make it to Santiago de Compostela.

If I didn’t die of hunger.

Because that June, for reasons I still don’t understand, every coastal town I walked through looked like the people had decided to leave the day before I got there.

On the rare occasions I saw people and tried to ask where the Camino route was, I’d get blank stares. Probably because 1) I didn’t speak Portuguese and 2) no one had ever heard of this route.

According to statistics from the pilgrim office, 33,000 of us walked into Santiago de Compostela that month. Only 1400 of us started in Porto. There are two routes that leave from there. How many of us chose the Coastal Route? Seventy-three.

Which would explain why I saw hardly any pilgrims on the route.

On my first night, I arrived at the hostel to find it closed. There was a sign on the door. In Portuguese. There was a phone number. But I didn’t have a phone that could call a Portuguese number. Thankfully, another pilgrim showed up. She called the number, someone arrived to let us in, and she and I shared a lovely dinner together. But she was actually walking the route backwards, so I would never see again.

On the second night, after retrieving the key to the hostel from the local Red Cross, only two other pilgrims showed up. Wonderful people, but they were biking the route. Which meant I’d never see them again, either.

Some days later, I took a break on the front steps of an abandoned restaurant in the middle of nowhere. As I peeled off my soaking wet socks to replace them with dry socks (that would be just as soaked in mere minutes), I tried to remember why I chose this route.

My friend Rick, whom I’d met on my first Camino just two years earlier, said he had enjoyed it. I’d seen an ad for a cheap flight to Porto and booked it quite suddenly. I was jobless, in Europe for three months, on a very tight budget, with no idea what to do with myself. But one thing I did know how to do that wouldn’t cost me much at all: walk the Camino .

So I took off. Just ten days after arriving in Europe. Leaving behind the boyfriend with whom I’d come.

Michael didn’t know much about the Camino and insisted that I call him every day. But I didn’t have a phone that worked in Portugal unless I had wifi. And in 2014, looking for wifi in seemingly abandoned Portuguese towns didn’t make my days any easier.

I remember arriving in a tourism office one afternoon, overjoyed to see they had wifi. I called Michael.

“How’s it going?” he asked.

“Miserable,” I said. The rain. The lack of trail markers. The lack of other walkers. The fact that the Portuguese didn’t even seem to know what the Camino was.

“Why don’t you just come back?” Michael wisely suggested.

I once read the advice to “never quite something on a bad day.” And my mother always told me that “things look better in the morning.”

So I told Michael I’d think about it and reassess the situation tomorrow.

The next day, I said to myself, “What is it that I love most about the Camino?”

“The people!” I answered.

No matter how hungry, wet, or lost I was, if I was with other people, I would still be enjoying this walk.

So I abandoned the unknown, unmarked, seemingly uninhabited Portuguese Coastal Route, headed inland to the more-populated route, made it to Santiago and promptly hopped a flight back to Michael.

So why, nine years later, did I decide to walk an even lesser known route?

(To Be Continued. . . )