Final Dispatch Del Camino
The ancients called this place the end of the world. And that’s what they believed it was.
Sean Dietrich
Cracker Barrel
Cracker Barrel is quiet this time of night. There are few cars in the parking lot. My wife is with me. We’ve been traveling all day.
On the way into the restaurant, I see a few kids sitting on rockers outside. They’re playing checkers.
Dispatches Del Camino
It is among the grandest churches in the world. It is one of the greatest achievements of man that took so long to build that architectural periods changed several times throughout its construction.
Even so, when you walk into Santiago de Compostela the first thing you see is not the cathedral. You neither see the gilded grandeur, nor the ornate.
The first things you see are pilgrims.
Dispatches Del Camino
Things I’ve seen in Spain.
Little children, deviceless in public, making blatant eye contact with adults, behaving ten years more mature than their age.
Dispatches Del Camino
Lugo, Spain, is a mini metropolis compared to the remoteness of the Camino Primitivo. For days we have been hiking in isolated mountains and faraway countrysides. It’s startling to see a city suddenly emerge from the landscape.
Dispatches Del Camino
I have learned that everyone walks the Camino for a reason. This is my second Camino, and thus far I have not met anyone who approaches this 1,500-year-old path without a spiritual and emotional objective.
The reasons are not always clear. Sometimes the reasons are even unclear to the person walking. But the reasons are there. They walk so they can find something. Something unnameable.
Dispatches Del Camino
What is God?
This single question underpins all things on the Camino de Santiago, a trail inhabited by us full-time pilgrims whose lives are contained in backpacks.
Dispatches Del Camino
Rain. It never stops coming. Rain, rain, rain. Sometimes it seems like all it does is rain.
It’s been raining for two days now on the Camino Primitivo. And there is no end in sight. Spanish news channels on television, which are wonderful media organizations whose reporters dress exquisitely, speak rapidly, and replay the same four news stories every six minutes, are predicting rain each day this week.
Dispatches Del Camino
The albergue looks like a mountain chalet. We are snugly situated deep within the Fonfaraón Mountains, which climb high into the Spanish sky, separating us from an entire civilization below the cloud line.
Here atop the world, the mountain peaks look like incarnations of the Appalachians, with a fuzzy, green carpet-like texture, rounded edges, and swooping valleys that gather pools of fog like a white lake.
We will be hiking this today.
Dispatches Del Camino
The village of Tineo is bathed in thick morning fog. The impenetrable miasma is smothering the Sierra de Tineo mountains like a damp dishrag.
The miasma is really spectacular. I have always wanted to use the word “miasma.” But I’ve never had a reason to use it until now. I’ve gone for many, many years with a burning passion to use this word, just like actual authors do in actual classic literature, but alas, I’ve never had the opportunity. Until today. But now that I’ve used “miasma,” I don’t feel any elation inside. In fact, I feel nothing. It was not the exuberant vocabularial experience I was hoping for.
Dispatches Del Camino
“Take time, pilgrim,” the old Frenchman said. “Take time to stop and smell every flower, not just some of them.”
He was old. If not in body, in soul. What little bit of white hair he once possessed had vanished. So had some of his teeth.
Dispatches Del Camino
A rooster crows as day breaks over the surrounding Cantabrian Mountains. He crows every few moments, singing an anthem to morning, his voice ringing throughout the tiny village of Cornellana.
I am in a bar, drinking morning joe. My bartender is working his buns off.
Dispatches Del Camino
Our first day walking the Camino. We leave our inn at Oviedo a little after daybreak. There are no people on the streets. No cars. Only one stray dog, dutifully cleaning his privates, and one old man hosing down a section of street in front of his shop while smoking a cigar the size of …
Dispatches del Camino
We find a table in the old Spanish café and order two cafés con leche. I order our breakfast by repeatedly tapping the menus and saying in English, “Uh, I’m sorry, I don’t know this word…”
My waitress finds my ordering technique amusing.
Andy Walks With Me
Our Father, which art in heaven, hi. How are you doing? How’s the family? Have you made any progress on that request I made earlier about Florida Powerball?
First Steps of the Camino
2:16 p.m.—We step off the plane in Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas Airport, and it is pure chaos. People crowd this ginormous public space like ants swarming a fallen Tootsie Pop. This place is like Black Friday at Walmart, only with less exposed thong underwear.
The Blind Coonhound
My granddaddy said you can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat a dog. Someone who treats a dog badly, is a bad person. A person who treats a dog with regard and deference is a good egg.
Right now, my wife is holding our blind coonhound, Marigold. She holds our rescue adoptee like a baby. Not like a dog.
The People Who Drive Us
My Uber driver is in her mid-30s, and she is friendly. She is driving us to our hotel, and we are stuck in gridlock traffic.
There is a network of tattoos adorning her limbs. As she drives, I notice a thumbprint tattoo on her neck. I ask about this tattoo.
The Camino Primitivo: Why I Hike With a Rock in My Pocket
My packing list for the Camino:
Hiking boots. The route we will be taking to Santiago this year is called the Camino Primitivo. It is the oldest route to Santiago. The first pilgrim to hike this particular route hiked it 1,200 years ago, shortly after the birth of Willie Nelson.