Let’s say your girlfriend of three-and-a-half years heads off to Europe for seven weeks–without you. You can’t believe she’d do such a thing. Again. You heard all her jabs about getting married, and you’d really been considering it. Well, at least I’ll have seven weeks to find the right ring, you think. You want this to…

Flora and Antonio knew about San Antón. Maybe they had read about it in their guidebook. Ruins of a 14 century church. No electricity. No hot water. 12 beds. Dinner and breakfast included. Cost: by donation. Maybe friends who have done the Camino told them about it. Maybe they stayed at a place earlier in…

“Maybe we should open the door a little bit, otherwise I think it will get way too hot in here tonight,” she said. Her roommate agreed, and she cracked open the door to the outside. She laid back down and felt a slight breeze wash over her, but she was still quite warm. And she…

Keeping up her habit of getting into the cars of people she hardly knows, our heroine used Blablacar.com for the first time today. It’s basically Uber meets hitchhiking. Drivers post where they’re going, when, how much money they want, and how many spaces they have available. Riders search for someone going their way. Why? Because…

Each time she walks a Camino our heroine finds herself, at some point on her journey, with an itchy skin rash or bites. Her retired dermatologist friend says bedbugs, but no one she encounters in Spain seems to think so. This year, she finds the same sentiment exists in France. On Saturday evening the only…

I arrived in Conques at noon on Saturday, July 1, after walking just 12 km (aka 7.5 rainy miles, including one particularly challenging rocky, slippery descent ). Check-in at the Abbaye St Foy did not begin until 2 PM. So I dropped off my backpack in their courtyard then went for a walk on the…

On Saturday, July 1, I left the gîte Domaine de Sénos around 8:30 a.m. I wore my rain jacket, my pack sheltered from the predicted weather by its rain cover. My hands were warm inside lined gloves — I learned the day before that bare hands clasped to hiking sticks on a rainy 60 degree…

“I haven’t been walking too far each day,” I told Dominic, my walking companion for the past two hours.  “But you walk fast!” he said. “Well, in the mornings, yes. But in the afternoons, not really. And if there’s a climb? I go like this,” I said, slowing my pace, putting my head down, and…

We could say our heroine walked alone on the afternoon of her seventh day on the Via Podiensis, but that would only be partially true. Though she was mostly devoid of human companionship on that day, she did manage to find companionship of another kind.  On Saturday, June 24, 2017, after a lunch of bread,…

Tuesday, June 20, Day 3: Monistrol d’Allier to La Clauze (19.2 km/12 miles) Our heroine has the habit of getting into trouble on the third day of her Caminos. We recall her first Camino when, at the suggestion of new Camino friends, she walked past her intended stop of Zubiri in favor of a promised…