Camino: Day 30

Camino de Santiago Primitivo

Day 30

This is a camino of gratitude for me. Each day, I choose something I am grateful for in my life and think and journal about it throughout the day. I will share an excerpt from my journal entries at the end of each day’s post.

Day 30: A Fonsagrada—Cadavo ~ 15 miles

23 October 2017

I stayed three nights in A Fonsagrada. The last several days of walking had just about worn my body out and my right hip was really bothering me. The best solution was rest. I also got some work done on a book design I was working on for a client.

Albergue Cantabrico was a comfortable place to stay—clean with comfortable beds and a very nice kitchen to work in. The only problem was that the cleaning lady started stripping beds at 8:00 am, waking up anyone who was thinking of making a later start than usual. Also, she tried to clean the kitchen while people were preparing their breakfast. The cleanliness of the place reflected her industry, but it was a bit annoying.

Images of the albergue at La Fonsagrada
Albergue Cantabrico was spotlessly clean, but at the expense of the opportunity to sleep in.

Now that I was in Galacia, there were kilometer markers telling us how far we were from Santiago. 95 miles to go!

Camino mile marker

Old church steeple with a tree growing out of the side
Check the left side of this bell tower carefully…A tree is growing!

I passed the ruins of another pilgrim’s “hospital” that had been in use until the early 1900s. These were the precursors to the albergues—providing rest and food for pilgrims since medieval times.

Ruins of an old Camino pilgrim's hospital
The old and the new…crumbling “hospital” with wind turbines nearby.

At one rest stop, I came upon Nicolai, a young pilgrim I had met a few times before. We talked a while over our coffee. We talked about temporary friendships and missing people. You make a lot of temporary friends on the Camino. Because I had stayed in A Fonsagrada extra days, I would never see the group of friends I had made during the last week. I doubted that I would ever see Caitlin and Gerry Browne, who I had met at La Vega.

It is funny, I don’t tend to miss people much—that is probably why I can be gone from home for months on end. But I sometimes feel guilty because I think I should miss people more—like I am not being a very good friend. But Nicolai turned this around for me. He believes that people who are comfortable in their own skin, do not need the attachment of other people in their lives. This gave me a lot to think about for several days.   

A temporary friend, Nicolai who I met on the way to Cadavo
This is the last I saw of Nicolai, but he left me with many things to think about.

Camino Day 30--Journal Entry

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