“How do you know how to do all this?” Dad asked me as we stood together waiting for the metro in Madrid.

“Do what?”

“This–trains, buses, subways . . .”

“On that high school trip to London, Mr. Briggs taught us how to use the subway, and once you know the idea, they’re pretty much all the same.”

“I could never do this,” my father said.

It was then that I realized: My parents have never had to navigate a public transit system. Let alone in a foreign country.

They hadn’t been let loose to roam London on their own at 17, like me. My mother didn’t see the ocean until her honeymoon. Her only international trip prior to my birth was to England as part of her teacher certification, but she was accompanied the entire time.

My father also traveled internationally in his 20s, but not by his own free will exactly. In 1968, he was drafted into the US Army and stationed in Heidelberg, Germany. When he left base, it was in his VW bug.

Their next international travel wasn’t until the 1980s when they won a Caribbean cruise. They cruised all over the Caribbean after that, but anyone who’s been on a cruise knows they, in no way, qualify as “independent travel.”

More recently my parents have been to Christmas markets in Germany and to Wuhan, China the month before the first COVID case; they’ve traveled to Corfu, Greece and Dubrovnik, Croatia. . . and many more. But for every one of these trips, from the moment they stepped off the plane, they didn’t have to plan a thing.

So when my mother told me a few months ago that she’d convinced my father to do 5 days on the Camino de Santiago alone so she and I could have some mother/daughter time, I sat in stunned silence.

“Really? He agreed to go without me?”

“Well, I told him you’d still book all his hotels and his luggage transfers and everything.”

“Yeah. That’s easy.”

“And I told him he’s done it enough with you that he knows how it works.” I thought about this and then agreed with my mother.

• He knows how to order a coffee.
• He can recognize the words “pasta bolognese” on a menu.
• On most days when we were on Camino together, Dad was ahead of me, often out of sight. Which means he had an eye for following the trail markers.
• He can recognize pilgrims and has no trouble starting up a conversation with them.

“And one of the sections we have left is completely flat,” I told my mother. “Without any trees. So he’ll be able to see pilgrims ahead of him and behind him–it would be hard for him to get lost.”

My parents were coming to visit in September–one of the busiest months on the Camino. The weather would be mild: not too hot, not too cold–nothing like our hike over the Pyrenees in a heat wave.

So I planned his trip.

It wasn’t until they arrived in Spain that I learned 3 of my 4 siblings only learned in the last few days that Dad was doing the Camino on his own.

My youngest sister Meg, who did know, said, “I’m not concerned–he’s got a much higher chance of getting shot in the Newburgh Walmart than he does of dying on the Camino.”

I learned there was a text message group among my four siblings, some of whom were incredulous that Dad would do such a thing. Or, more likely, that I would “let” Dad do such a thing. I have no idea what the discussion was. Thankfully, they didn’t include me.

I am not immune to worrying about Dad on the Camino. But I’ve done enough of it with him to have adjusted–if not quite accepted–that he is a grown man who makes his own decisions and who is, in fact, not my responsibility.

“How was it?” I asked Dad on his second day.

“That had to be the worst day I’ve ever had on the Camino.” My heart dropped into my stomach.

“Forty mile per hour winds. Rain the entire day. I heard some places were telling pilgrims not to walk today. There were police at the intersections asking if we were okay.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. Dad’s “worst day” was weather-related. Wet things and wet people dry. That’s easy.

If asked my opinion of Dad’s worst day on the Camino, I’d choose another moment.

But three out of four of my siblings don’t know about that moment. . . so I’ll save that story for another time.