Jill and Bow's Travels

Walking the Camino de Santiago

We are arrived in Barcelona, Spain last Tuesday. It´s been an exciting week - from city life to our new life of walking.

When we got off the plane in Spain we met another young Canadian couple who were lots of fun. They happen to be walking the camino de santiago as well. We spent a few days together in Barcelona. We arrived downtown in the Barri Gotti around 11pm and the streets were absolutely mad with people, music, and food. We couldn´t believe our luck that we would come into the city on such an exciting night. We later found out that it was a week long festival in Barcelona and that the nightlife had been going on for days.

The four of us found and went out to enjoy the festivities until all hours of the night ... we enjoyed a couple of spontaneous dance parties. We spent the next couple of days in the city. We went back to Parc Guell, which is the most amazing park filled with Gaudi´s mosaics.

We left Barcelona on Thursday and spent a night with Jan Van Straaten (family friend) in Toulouse, France before heading onto St Jean Pied du Port on Friday to start walking the camino.

The camino de santiago is a walking journey of over 800 kms from St Jean Pied du Port in the French Pyrenees across northern Spain to Santiago de Compestello. Over 175,000 "pilgrims" set out each year to accomplish this route, staying at refugios along the way. We were inspired by my brother Ben and father to walk the camino after they walked in in 2000. Les has recently come back from walking it in September and loved it.

We set out not knowing if we would walk some or all of the camino ... I guess we´ll see how things go along the way. Since time is on our side, we would like to finish it.

When we arrived in St Jean on Friday at around 4pm we shipped a bunch of our stuff onto Santiago to make our packs as light as possible. We then went to get our Pilgrims Passports. Georges at the office was quite the character and convinced us to start walking right away. The first day is one of the biggest, walking 27kms up and over the Pyrenees. I believe it involves climbing and descending a total of 1250 metres. He said that we could walk up 6 kms and stay at a private refugio to help us make the next day less painful. So we did it. The walk was quite difficult ... getting adjusted to walking straight up with our packs on our backs. However, the beautiful countryside was such a treat to look at.

We arrived at 7:30pm, just in time for dinner with around 25 other people. The food tasted great ... an eight course meal. We then went right to bed.

Saturday was a big day - a total of 30km walked. Our bodies were exhausted by the end. Yesterday was an even bigger day ... we walked 35 km in total - what were we thinking? We arrived in the suggested destination around 2pm and we weren´t too tired so we thought we would carry on. Well we ended up walking all of the way to Pamplona, the city famous for the running of the bulls.
We walked so far, we were delusional. We couldn´t stop laughing - everything was funny. Our bodies felt like they had a major beating - I now know what I will feel like when I´m 92.

Now that we´re back in Spain, we definitely have to put a lot more effort into our Spanish. We´re getting everything mixed up. Last night, when Bow went to ask for the bill he said "Just le Cuenta" ... that´s English, French, and Spanish.

We´re off to walk about 20km on this bright sunny day.
Jilly

Posted by jill at September 29, 2003 10:42 AM