It's springtime and life on the Camino is cranking up. I got an email this morning from a woman I have never met but whom I advised last year when she and her sister were preparing to walk the Camino. The writer loved it; the sister did not and so they ended only after a week or so. Now, the writer is returning to finish the Camino without her sister. She loved being in Spain during Holy Week and Easter and so she will spend those days walking. She wrote to those whom she knows who have walked the Camino asking for our prayers. She has them, of course.
Those who undertake the camino as a spiritual exercise or pilgrimage, however they define it, usually get a Credencial at the starting point in Roncesvalles, tucked away in the Pyrenees. Many people actually start walking on the other side of the Pyrenees, in France at Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, so they can say they have crossed the mountains. We finished up last year in Spain in Roncesvalles, ending where we had begun walking in 2004. Unfortunately for us, the day we crossed the Pyrenees, it was pea soup so we didn't get to see the vista. Instead, all we saw were sheep in the fog, hearing them before we came upon them.
In any event, the Credencial is the pilgrim's passport to lodging at refugios and aubergues (hostels) along the way. There's a hierarchy of need on the Camino: those who walk get first crack at lodging, then those who bicycle, then those who walk without transporting their belongings on their back and, if there's any room left, those who drive the Camino. In France, one can make reservations; in Spain, usually one can't so that leads to a race to get to the hostels early enough to get a bed and, preferably, not in the middle of a large room. The three of us tend to opt for one-star hotels because it makes doing nightly laundry oh so much more easy.
The pilgrim gets the Credencial stamped with the locales of where one stays. It seems ridiculous to see a bunch of adults asking inn-keepers to stamp their Credencial but there's logic to the madness because one has to have proof of walking the last 100 kms (66 miles) in order to get the coveted Compostela, the certificate that states that the pilgrim has completed the pilgrimage... for spiritual reasons.
We will take the Credencial we started and finished in 2004 and work on the middle chunk. We're doing this all out of order but it doesn't matter; we will have covered every inch of the Camino (and then some).
