Sucking on Pebbles

In your Camino, sometimes you will have to do things you wouldn’t normally do, just to give you the feeling that you are going to survive.

On my Camino de Santiago, it was this day when I had planned to walk 30 Km, I was getting out of Burgos, a big city with a beautiful cathedral but what I hated about it (and all other big cities) is getting in and out of it when you have to walk through the ugly industrial areas. Also this day was at the beginning of my tendonitis and I didn’t really get what was wrong with my foot/leg but I couldn’t walk properly.

So I set off with two friends, Gastone and Jenny for the first 10 Km with no breaks and then we have

One further addition to the slow group

Previously I’ve mentioned how our slow walking group was gathered, and started increasing in number. I’ve written one post about how the initial group started, and then another one about how Chris joined in.

A few days later,one of the amazing people we met and that has been walking with us in an on/off pattern called us to meet up in Foncebadon, a city that was almost 25-28 Km from where we would start our walk.The day didn’t start off very good, it was really cloudy, and then started raining really bad.

Bad Weather on the Camino

By noon, however, or as usual, it got really sunny and really hot. But not for too long, because by 3 in the evening it was

And then More People became as Slow as us

In the first part of the story I mentioned how the group/gang was originally created. Where a group of four slow bar walker/bar crawlers joined together, Kerstin and Leo from Germany, Brady from USA and I.

Sometime later, on a sunny morning, 4 Km after Leon (a Beautiful city I’ll talk about later). We were having coffee in a bar in a small village. As usual we stayed there for SO long, some of us even drinking two cups of coffee (cafe con leche). Finally we got up, started walking, and we had to cross a street so we were waiting for the green light, when we saw Chris (The Johnnie Walker guy from the first and third day). We crossed the street together the he said (in a heavy Norwegian accent) “Mina, I saw you leaving the albergue two hours ago!! How did it take you so long to just reach here?”

Chris - Special made socks - Complemented by an old lady

Embarrassed, I replied “Well we stayed almost 50 minutes in that previous bar”
“You take breaks that early?”
“It’s our second

Great People of the camino – Ismael

“This guy over there I think he is Arab like you, his name is Ismael” that’s what Linda, one of the very good friends I made told me after dinner in Zubiri, my 3rd night on the Camino.

“Yes, Ismael is an Arabic name!” I said happily, thinking I finally found someone Arabian. Although with my first glance at him I knew he wasn’t Arab, or atleast 100% not Egyptian!

Ismael (On the right)

I went over and started talking to him, he was already in a

How I met my friends on the Camino de Santiago

This is actually a funny story, or maybe it is only funny for us, the group that formed and bonded out of the blue. I’ll just share it with you anyway.

Our group, the people that reached Finisterre, some of us have left a couple of days before.

I started walking the first day out of Saint Jean Pied de port with the couple that I met and hitch hiked with/without from Pam

The More You Climb, the More Painful it is to Descend

The best thing about starting the camino in Saint Jean Pied de Port was seeing how hard it is from Day 1 – well I have been seeing how bad it is before even walking the first day out of SJPP – but even when you smoothly reach SJPP, first day out is not an easy one, some even call it the hardest day of the whole camino! The town itself is on a mountain cliff so taking an afternoon walk through SJPP means you are climbing up and down all the time! But walking west towards Spain meant you are climbing the Pyrenees, and then descending them towards Roncesvalles.

Heading West Towards Spain (Looking Backwards)

The Day We Stole a Dog

There are times when you get a choice between the easy path and the hard one, yet you still choose the hard path. For different reasons, maybe to prove it to yourself, maybe to prove it someone else, and maybe even just to brag about it later; but the basic fact is, me and my Camino friends decided to walk “el Camino Duro” (Translation from Spanish: The Hard Way) when we had this option on day 26 of walking between Cacabelos and Vega de la Valcarce.

Climbing "el Camino Duro"

We started climbing, and climbing, and climbing, it was an endless climb, and in no time we were high above

A Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins With a Single Step

As cheesy as this may sound, it has proved to be more than 100% true. I know everyone has heard this sentence more than a 1000 times; in movies, from parents, grandparents, friends, or anyone. You just have heard it before. But I wanted to share my experience with it, and how it literally is true.

Approximately 800 km/500 miles, that is how long El Camino de Santiago is. I decided to walk this Camino for various reasons which I have discussed in a previous post. But getting actually to Saint Jean Pied de Port in France (Part one of getting there, Part two, and three) and waking up the next morning, and starting to walk? That is a totally

A Painful Road Completes A Beautiful Landscape

A Painful road completes a beautiful landscape

So I have walked through the paved and the weary roads. Through the flat lands and up through the mountains. Each

Weary Road.

road had its beauty in its own way. None was easy, but that didn’t decrease their beauty in anyway.

When I first started walking I thought walking a flat land on the Camino was easier. But I was wrong about that, because with every new stage came the new difficu