“My feet are on fire!” my wife told me.
“But we are literally just yards from our hotel,” I pleaded.
“My feet are going to explode!” she countered.
The best vacation ever, our friends said. Did they lie? Are they now at home laughing at us, or did aliens abduct them while they were here and implant them with false memories?
This was our third day walking the pilgrimage from Porto, Portugal, to Santiago de Compostela, Spain, commonly called the El Camino. The Camino Primitivo is the third most popular Christian pilgrimage behind ones in Rome and Jerusalem. Many different routes from all over Europe converge on Santiago and the Bones of St. James.
We were walking a lesser-known route of the Portuguese Way that travels north along the coast with breathtaking views of the Atlantic Ocean, rocky beaches and beautiful coastal towns.
Later, once we were cleaned, fed, watered and had taken time to relax in bed (the hotel room was so small that only one of us could be up at a time), I thought about what I was missing that our friends experienced. So far, after three long days on the Camino, I would not put this trip in my top 10 list of vacations, and I’m certainly not feeling the spiritual side of things after ending each day so tired and sore.
I decided to text John, a friend who had trained to be a Catholic monk, for some guidance: “How can I be spiritual when my feet hurt so badly?”
His reply a few hours later was succinct: “Your feet on fire = suffering = community with Christ’s suffering = participation in Christ’s resurrection. Now then. The question becomes whether one must ‘feel spiritual’ in order for this process to work. Answer is no. God’s grace is complete in and of itself; it has no need for us to be conscious of its progress.”
A few minutes later John added an afterthought: “Actually, Nietzsche called this aspect of Christianity a fraud. Think about it… How can suffering ever be good?”
And a few minutes after that, he sent another follow-up: “Doesn’t that sound like gaslighting? Tertullian answered (Tertullian was an early Christian theologian and writer): Credo quia absurdum / I believe it (precisely) because it is absurd. I think Tertullian’s is an honest response.”
That night, I knocked my head on the shower door after moving too quickly in a bathroom meant for Leprechauns, and I contemplated how I got here—here being Viana do Castelo, Portugal, a beautiful town overlooking the mouth of the Rio Lima as it flows into the Atlantic Ocean.
We had walked more than 40 miles and had 120 to go. In the last hours of the third day, we crossed the Rio Lima on a bridge Gustave Eiffel built, but I was so tired that I wouldn’t have cared if Mickey Mouse had built it. I just wanted to be on the other side and inside my hotel room!
In our 40 years of marriage, this is our first vacation like this. We have always been relatively fit, maybe a few pounds too many, of course. My wife loves the gym where she takes classes, lifts weights and earned her yoga-teaching license. I hate gyms and just run as my primary means of exercise. I did some half-marathons, and up until a few years ago, I refereed soccer.
The idea came from my wife’s best friend and her husband who had walked the Portuguese Way and raved about the trip and declared that it was the best vacation they had ever taken.
I was dubious, but my wife was all in. When we asked what made it so great, they said they liked the simplicity of the walk. You have no decisions to make; you just get up and start walking—spending time quietly thinking about and talking to the Lord as the miles drift by. It didn’t sound like my kind of vacation.
My friend who took on the challenge himself said that after the first couple of days, he underwent a mental transformation from tourist to pilgrim—changing the way he viewed the purpose of the trip. This friend, an orthopedic surgeon and Mississippi writer, found comfort in the fact that fellow believers had traveled this same path, also called the Original Way, for more than 1,000 years. With its ancient churches, temples and hospitals, the journey demonstrated to him that a force—God, by our beliefs—was present then and now.
But it was my 70th birthday, and I wanted to be somewhere remarkable while having a unique experience and avoiding birthday parties.
“Wow!” I thought, his perspective helping to ease my mind.
Encounters of Many Kinds
One of the things that we observed along the El Camino was an immediate intimacy with the people we met. It’s as if the social mores that keep strangers distant from one another were completely gone. People would just start talking as if they were our best friends. I took advantage of this to ask people why they were walking El Camino.
Early on we had crossed paths several times with a couple of Romanian women: Antonella and Christina. They were high-school friends who reunited in Ireland a couple of years ago after Christina moved there. Antonella had been in Ireland for 26 years. They were easy to spot as Antonella always wore a recognizable dress.
I asked them why they were walking El Camino, and I got the most out of Antonella as she was rather bombastic and loquacious. Antonella decided to walk the pilgrimage because Christina, a devout Catholic, had asked her to come. Describing herself as spiritual but not religious, Antonella said she loved El Camino because she enjoys meeting people and because of the synchronicity of the Way. That word “synchronicity” came up many times. I asked her to explain what she meant but couldn’t understand her well, because of her Romanian-accented Irish.
Our first experience with synchronicity was with the Romanian women themselves. One morning, we all ended up at a café high on a bluff overlooking the Atlantic. I say we because by this time we knew everyone undergoing this journey who was moving at the same pace as us. This ad hoc group included my wife and me; Antonella and Christina; a group of six or seven people of Asian descent traveling together; Tamara, a 40-something German woman walking alone; and a Slovakian man in his 60s.
The Romanian women left, and I noticed that Antonella had left her walking stick behind. I debated with myself, Tamara and my wife about taking it with us and hoping to catch up with them, but I didn’t want the responsibility. What if she returned for it and I missed her? What if I never find her and I’m stuck carrying three walking sticks for the remainder of the trip?
Tamara concluded that I should take it and promptly left the café. We caught up with the Romanian women later. They were having a snack in the shade next to a lovely babbling brook. They weren’t surprised when I returned Antonella’s walking stick as Tamara had already passed them, but they were very appreciative. We left them there and didn’t see them again.
We leapfrogged with Tamara throughout the trip. On the day before our final push, we hadn’t seen her for a few days. We walked for about four hours and saw a sign advertising a café about 100 meters up this narrow muddy track. It was a lovely little café. Not at all crowded, and it had a nice bathroom (very important!). We had gotten our refreshments coffee when a knock drew our eyes to the window through which Tamara was smiling and waving at us. She appeared fine, though she was a bit hoarse as we started catching up on where we had been and what we had seen since we last spoke.
Suddenly Tamara started wheezing, and then this weird whistling noise came out of her throat. She stood up and threw her hands over her head and started walking up and down the café with the wheezing and whistling getting worse with each step. She went outside, and I frantically tried to get my boots on as the barista ran out to check on her. I looked at my wife, who shrugged her shoulders and told me there is nothing to be done until she passes out (she’s been in the medical field her entire life and is way too casual in an emergency).
I exited the door and met the returning barista, who asked me if I spoke Spanish, I shook my head no and headed toward Tamara. The barista came back out with a very old man sporting very few teeth who spoke a little broken English. They wanted to know if my daughter needed an ambulance. I assured them that she would be OK.
After a few minutes, her attack was over. She was breathing and asked Anne what she should do. Anne said we needed to find a clinic for some antibiotics and a breathing treatment. Tamara checked her phone and found one just a few miles down the road. She thanked us and got up to leave when my wife told her we were going with her.
Tamara said there was no need, that she was fine. I told her we had to go with her. What would happen if she had another attack and fell in a ditch and drowned? We would feel terrible for not ensuring she had proper care. I insisted that she give me the phone number for her husband in Germany, just in case. She started to call us Mom and Dad at some point.
We headed off on a major road going in the same direction as El Camino. After a few hours of searching, we got to the clinic, but it was closed. It was Maundy Thursday in very Catholic Spain. We ended up walking together all the way to Padron, our destination for the day, and we found an open medical clinic there. Later that night Tamara sent us a selfie of her wearing a mask and getting a breathing treatment, confirming her improving health.
The next morning, she texted to ask Anne whether she should be walking with a sore throat while taking the “antibiotikum” or if she should take a bus to Santiago? Anne tells her to take her antibiotics and to drink plenty of water and she should be alright. Tamara sent over a picture of the granola bar Anne had given her before and thanked us for the breakfast as she let us know she was leaving on foot. She must have booked it because she reached the Santiago Cathedral hours before Anne and I did.
We had many other encounters along the Way. We met a lovely, petite young German woman walking alone named Melanie. We shared a running joke with a couple people from the Asian group, as they were often waiting for the rest of their adventuring party to catch up to them. The two would gesture to help explain that the others were eating, sunbathing or finding a restroom, for example.
Anne and I spent a few hours together that day, walking in the rain, and we discovered that we had mutual friends walking the Camino. It was about this time that I realized something quite unexpectedly. My wife and I were getting along miraculously well. For months my wife had been voicing her concern over our ability to spend that much time together under stress. She was worried that we would constantly be sniping at each other and mad and that the trip would be a nightmare.
This concern was valid. I can be, let’s say, difficult, I know. But early on, and my wife said it first, we found that we were each one half of a whole. Everything was so different: food, languages and the daily physical challenge of walking 15 miles. We needed each other to find our way, metaphorically and physically. We grew much closer over those weeks than we had been in many years.
The weather had been beautiful for the first week or so. Then we had a little rain, followed by a proverbial biblical flood on the final day, as the downpour continued all day without stopping. When we had only a few kilometers to go, my wife went into death-march mode. She didn’t want to stop; she didn’t want to change to dry socks (they would have just gotten wet again). She walked in the center of the path where the puddles were biggest. She was done.
The end of El Camino is in front of the Cathedral of Santiago. All the pilgrims go there to take a commemorative photo. Tamara had already texted hers. Approaching Santiago, I asked if she wanted to do that. Her answer was an emphatic “No!” We went straight to the hotel, showered and changed into dry clothes. It was a couple of hours later that we finally found ourselves in front of the cathedral for our victory picture.
Was this the greatest vacation ever for me? I say no, however, if the measure for greatness were determined by how much I learned about myself, how much improvement in my relationship with my wife there was, the gain in friends and unique experiences and increased self-confidence, then I have to almost begrudgingly say that yes, this vacation was absolutely worthwhile.
This MFP Voices essay does not necessarily represent the views of the Mississippi Free Press, its staff or board members. To submit an opinion for the MFP Voices section, send up to 1,200 words and sources fact-checking the included information to voices@mississippifreepress.org. We welcome a wide variety of viewpoints.
