For months now (about three, to be exact), I’ve been wanting to go back and fill in some stories from the traveling I did this summer. I wrote all about the Camino, but I never described my long layovers in Iceland. Or the solo-traveling I did around Galicia in the days after I arrived in Santiago, and before leaving for Finisterre. And then there was the trip to France: the Côte d’Azur, Provence and Paris.
I sat down just now to write about the towns I visited in Galicia, and started to look through my photos from those days. One of the photos caught my eye and I clicked to enlarge it. It is by no means a very good photo, but it captures the essence of an experience better than so many of my other shots did.
It’s a picture of my hotel room, the very first room I had all to myself in over a month of traveling. I was in the town of A Coruna, a coastal city in the northwest corner of Spain. I’d arrived that afternoon after taking a train from Santiago. I was alone, and, also for the first time in over a month, I felt unsettled. So many pilgrims along the way said things like, “I’ve gained so much confidence from walking on the Camino. I know that if I can do this, I can do anything. Traveling anywhere- using public transportation- will seem so easy after this!”
I felt exactly the opposite. I had mastered walking, of putting on my shoes in the morning and setting out on a well-marked path, always running into people I knew, or at least recognized. But hopping on a train and arriving in a bustling city and seeing not a single pilgrim? I didn’t know what to do with myself. It felt completely foreign, in a way that my previous month of travel never had. I was a fish out of water, walking through town with my heavy pack and my hiking shoes.
But I figured it out, of course. I asked a man for directions, and he couldn’t have been more helpful. I found the tourist office (after asking a woman for help), and they directed me to a few inexpensive hotels. I checked in, the guy behind the desk seemed amused at my backpack and my tales of walking across Spain. I felt like I had to tell someone, like I had to explain everything I’d just done, to somehow mark the change that was taking place. I was in a new city and for the first time since I’d arrived in Spain, I hadn’t walked there. For the first time, I wasn’t sleeping in an albergue or meeting up with other pilgrims. The Camino was so fresh, so recent, and now I was in a strange town, alone. The clerk handed me my key, and waved me upstairs.
I walked into the room and it was a bit grim but it was also wonderful. Because, for a night, it was all mine. After arriving in Santiago I had four days to kill before my friend from home would come to join me on the walk to Finisterre. I’d tossed around a few ideas: stay in Santiago for those four days. Walk to Muxia and take a bus back to Santiago. Travel with a Camino friend to Portugal.
It was when I was sitting in the cathedral, the morning I’d arrived in Santiago, listening to the Spanish mass when I decided what to do: I was going to travel around the region alone. I needed something to mark the end of my Camino, and to separate the journey I’d just completed, alone, with the small Camino journey I was about to take with my friend. I also knew that I had so much to process from my walk, and I just wanted a few days away.
The hotel room felt a bit lonely, initially, so I just emptied a few things from my pack and then set off into town. I walked along a pathway next to the water, I explored the city center and I drank a glass of wine in the square. And then I went to the grocery store.
The last thing I wanted to do was bide my time until 10pm when it was acceptable to sit down at a restaurant to have dinner. And besides, I didn’t feel like sitting in a restaurant alone. So I found a grocery store, and I splurged.
I bought everything that looked good to me and then headed back to the hotel, where I settled in for my feast. After a month on the Camino with 3-course meals, endless glasses of wine and tapas, mid-afternoon cafe con leches… this felt decadent. Spreading my goods out on my bed (a real, stand alone, non-bunk bed bed!), pouring myself a glass of cheap and mediocre wine from a small cardboard box, popping open a bag of Cheetos and digging into a huge chunk of cheese with my Spork… this was decadence. I kicked off my shoes, laid on the bed, turned the television to a Spanish pop music channel, and scrolled through my phone to catch up on a month’s worth of facebook posts.
The photos of the gorgeous Spanish coast can wait; for now, for that night, this was my paradise.
Wait, that’s what breakfast looked like for me every day of the Camino 😛
I had a camping tent with me through the south of France all the way through Burgos so the experience of privacy wasn’t a novelty, but taking the train for the first time was. I went west to Vigo to visit a college friend and then took the train all the way across Spain to Barcelona. What really sank in was that for about half that train ride we more or less followed the Camino across the northern Iberian peninsula, and what took me 4 weeks to cover on foot took probably 6 hours by rail. That was a head spinner!