Finisterra to Santiago to Madrid to Frankfurt to HOME

All right, I’ve been lazy, but as my aunt reminded me, I have a story to finish.

The bar in Finisterra shut down, and the boys still hadn’t come to find us. We moseyed on back up to the pension house and found our note in the street...somehow it had come off the door handle. No sign of the boys. We tried to call up through the windows in case they’d gone in, but there was no response. Christa mentioned that some guy earlier in the trip had scaled his way onto the balcony when he was locked out of a place...yeah, RIGHT...there was NO scaling this building, either side. I checked. (I had already thought of that, but McGyver I ain’t, and our only Chuck Norris relative was one of the missing boys.)

So we waited. It was about 1:30 at this point. There was a dumpster across the street from the pension, and someone had very thoughtfully decided to dispose of a sofa right next to it. So we sat down and waited. Had a butterscotch. Waited some more. I decided to go cruise the harborfront again, in case we’d missed them, and told Christa I’d be back in ten minutes. No joy. The cafes were all shut down and the only people on the harbor were locals. As I climbed back up the hill to the pension, I could hear voices coming down the hill.

2am and the boys were back. Ricardo seemed fine, but Skip must’ve added about another 5k to his walk back by weaving back and forth across the street...he was blitzed. Once again, red wine had done in the kangaroo (turns out that was the story back in Villafranca, the day before he climbed to O Ceb, too). Their beach had been on the OTHER SIDE of the cape...no chance we would’ve ever found them. They’d had a blast, and we weren’t to the point where we were pissed off yet (we meaning me, since Christa NEVER gets pissed off), so after being obnoxious in the streets for another five minutes or so and waking up our pension owner on the third floor (something we’d been trying NOT to do, which is why we didn’t just buzz her to let us in), we all just went inside to crash.

I started getting my stuff ready for the morning, which was coming in five hours. We had a room with two twin beds, and when we got into our beds, Christa didn’t turn out the light. It was funny...we both just laid there and looked at each other for a while...it was our last night together and I knew how much I was going to miss her. After I got on that bus, our Camino would be at an end. I think she was thinking the same thing. We went back over a few of our stories and giggled a lot. She was one of the best gifts the Camino gave me, and she said the same thing to me. It was humbling...I’d thought of her as a gift for weeks, but it was hard to imagine that I’d been the same for her. What an incredibly good friend she’d been.

The alarm went off early...I stumbled to the shower and packed up the rucksack one more time. She got dressed to walk to the bus stop with me. We were too late for coffee, but we got one last picture and watched the sun come up over the harbor. We sang her sun song one more time...she taught it to me in German and said she sings it every morning, and also at school when it’s a child’s birthday (forgot to mention, apparently, that Christa is an elementary school teacher and has the same 30 kids from 1st grade through 4th before starting over again with a new crop). The song in translation is:

Light from heaven
Light for your heart
Light for all creatures, and
May light be on your way.

When the bus pulled away, she stood on tiptoe and waved with both arms high over her head till we were out of sight. I assume she waved till we were out of sight...by then, I couldn’t see through my tears.


I couldn’t concentrate on that for long, though, for a couple reasons. 1) The bus driver apparently wanted to give all his passengers a taste of what it’s like to be a passenger in a bus doing a NASCAR road course at full speed, and 2) we were driving along some truly gorgeous coastline at sunrise, and I’d missed a lot of it by walking through rain and fog to get there. After a while, I managed to fall asleep.

I was supposed to have two and a half hours in Santiago before I had to make it to the train station at 2, so I was pretty excited when we pulled into the bus station at 10:30, after only 2 hours and ten minutes. So I took my time getting back to the cathedral. Unfortunately, it was still only 10:30 when I reached the cathedral. Uh oh. Watch stopped. After a moment of panic, I got the time, and was back to my former time limit. I wandered the square, looking for Hank or Al or Mimi and Jocelyn...anyone familiar. No one. The familiar faces that had resurfaced time and again on the Camino, friends or acquaintances or just faces, had all cycled through, and this crop had been behind us. It felt really strange to be on my own.

A bit of last-day shopping. Hit the little Thai-incense-thrift store again from a few days ago, where I’d gotten the gorgeous blue scarf that Christa had loved so much and that I left stuffed in the bottom of her rucksack for her to find after I’d gone. Picked up a few for me and one for my mom. Had a spot of coffee, did some thinking about how strange it would be to leave the Camino and the realm of the yellow arrows for good, and headed to the train station.

The wait for the train was uneventful. But like in Paris a month ago, I got everything else wrong as soon as I got on. I got the car right but got the seat wrong, and the conductor had to move me, which was frustrating. No one got into my old seat, and I fumed about it for a little while till the man next to me with the walrus moustache explained in Spanish that there would be stops along the way and someone would eventually occupy my seat.

He was looking at sheet music. I asked him what he played. Mandolin. Samba music. He was an auto shop teacher and was traveling with his two little daughters, about 5 and 8. He was very kind, spoke NO English, and it was very touching to watch him with his girls. And he wanted to talk about EVERYTHING. I’m sure it was clear from my botched Spanish and my ubiquitous present-tense verbs (I NEVER got the hang of verb tenses in Spanish class, either in middle school OR college) that my ability in the language was limited, but that didn’t stop him from wanting to discuss everything from Spanish literature to the history of the Camino to philosophy to the economy to gas consumption in Europe to the American presidential race. I managed to hold my end of a 20/80 conversation and he seemed satisfied with that, taking my pen and writing words I couldn’t understand in my Sudoku book when I got stuck in the conversation. He wrote his email address, too. Told me he lived in Madrid but didn’t like big cities so he visited his brother a lot in Santiago. He had another in Beijing. VERY nice man. Also rescued me from the intercar pneumatic doors once, which, unlike most automatic doors and windows and things in the States, do NOT reopen when something (me) gets stuck in them, but keep pressing firmly closed with bone-crunching force. That man was a saint.

The train arrived in Madrid after 7 hours and it took me a good 20 minutes to find out how to get onto the Metro system, and another 10 to understand how to buy a ticket to Dawn’s stop. Made it and followed her directions to her apartment and buzzed her just before 10pm. She had a couple friends already there and we headed out for dinner. We found a sidewalk cafe (several, actually, all in a row) with music playing and pretty good food...talked a lot about this and that. We hung it up about 12:15, which I hated to initiate, but I was going to be up at 5:30 for another full day of travel after my second 4-hour night in a row.

It was nice to be in a room by myself, but it felt strange to sort through the pack for one last night routine. I got a decent amount of sleep and dragged myself out of bed before dawn for a shower and my trip to the airport.

The flights passed in a blur. I vaguely noted how inefficient Travelocity had been to route me through Frankfurt on a trip from Madrid to DC. The Frankfurt leg had me in an exit row, YAY, and the gate attendant had promised me another for the leg to DC, which would’ve made the whole day a piece of cake. HAH.

Not to be. I was wedged into a middle seat between IndiaNoDeoderant and SnoresWhileAwake. I seriously considered faking a panic attack due to claustrophobia in order to get myself a bulkhead seat, even if it was going to be next to the screeching 2 year old in the row ahead of us...hey, it worked for the guy who had a Pekingese in a carrier. But decided against it. Tried to practice some of Christa’s serenity. She’d gone on a 10-day SILENT Buddhist retreat, and I imagine that must’ve been where she got her infallible sense of placid acceptance. I turned on Life of Pi, timed the 90 minutes it took for the flight attendants to clear away our lunch trays (which would’ve had any American Airlines FA in fits) and tried to just close my eyes and make 8 hours and 5 minutes pass as quickly as possible.

They did. Customs, baggage claim, exit, and there was my dad. It was SO GOOD to see his face. Strange to get in the truck. Didn’t want my bag in the truck bed; it looked like rain, but the rain never came. Was THRILLED to see gas prices had dropped a good $0.40 since I’d been gone (ha ha, thrilled to see $3.60 gas??). Home, Mom, my brother, and pizza...good, honest-to-God American Domino’s pizza. Bliss.

After something like the Camino, you re-enter your life like you’re getting into an ice-cold swimming pool...one toe at a time. You’re torn between the joy of being home in your own country, and the fear that everything you’ve just gone through will melt away like smoke on the wind. It’s all too much, and you want to wrap the past month around you like a blanket, to insulate you from life-as-normal. It’s disorienting. Driving a car again. I didn’t want to turn on my phone...afraid it would erupt into texts and voice mails and rule my life again. I wanted to tell everyone everything I’d thought and seen and done, and yet it felt like giving it away, like if I talked about it too much, it wouldn’t be mine anymore, there would be none left for me.

The last thing I want is for someone to ask, “So, what did you learn?” Not ready for that yet. Won’t be for a while. The lessons will keep coming for months, maybe years.

I told my friend Trinity today that what makes the Camino such a living metaphor for life is the fact that it’s a linear walk. It’s not some place in the Blue Ridge you drive to, then go hiking, and then come back to the car, back to where you started. Like life, you walk in one direction. You leave one place and arrive at another place far away, with little stops along the way, and people who may be with you for moments or weeks, and there’s no way to tell which it will be when you meet. All you can do is make the most of every encounter, soak in every stunning vista, and be as solidly in the moment as you can be, without longing for company you once had or a tomorrow you hope will go a certain way. The moment is all you have, the piece of earth you’re standing on that moment...nothing else can be predicted. People may reappear when you least expect it...like with Christa in San Juan de Ortega, or when you hope they will, like the German boys at O Cebriero, or far after you’d expected, like Skip in Santiago. But there’s nothing you can do about someone else’s pace, and to try to match yours with someone else’s is always a mistake. You just have to walk your own walk, open your eyes, and look around you, as aware of the here and now as you can be. Like the woman in the candlelit breakfast cafe said, “Aqui y ahora,” here and now, no more.



One day back, and I went to the supermarket. Bought tomatoes and Philly cream cheese, will probably buy a baguette at Panera to make one of Skip’s bocadillos. Lingered long in the lotion aisle. Made a special trip to CVS for its trail mix, the kind I’d brought at the beginning of the trip, and thought of the Pyrenees and Zubiri while I crunched mouthfuls of nuts and raisins and M&Ms. Strange to buy things irrespective of their weight, strange to not have immediately on hand everything I needed (in the car: where’s my hand lotion?), strange to drive 100 miles of errands today and think, that’s about a week’s worth of walking.... Picked up a clothesline and wooden clothespins...thinking of diminishing my dryer use (doubt Virginia’s summer rains will cooperate, but that doesn’t bother me). Brought my cat home from the folks’ house.

Haven’t unpacked the rucksack yet...not ready yet.

Hit the Starbucks and gave the capsule of Finisterra sand to the gal who asked me to bring her back soil from Spain...told her this was one better and she’d know I didn’t just scoop it out of my backyard. She gave me my Grande Raspberry Mocha on the house, and OH it was sweet.

Finally got some Michael Phelps swimming commentary in English...he just won the butterfly...HELL yeah. It’s been tough to miss Olympic swimming, though I feel silly for thinking about it in the face of the experience I’ve had.

The girls are demanding I come out. I’m hoping their jaws will hit the floor and they’ll tell me how great I look, but so far, no one’s commented much beyond my father saying my knees are skinnier. Ha ha. (He said I looked healthy and happy and bright and wonderful.)

I lost a grand total of TWO POUNDS. TWO. One kilo.

Apparently, my body has declared that we will be THIS SIZE. PERIOD. I’m cool with that. A bit blown that I can walk 500 miles in 30 days and not change much, but I choose to believe I was just in awesome shape to start with. Ha ha haaaa. =)

My keyboard is hard to get used to again. I was lucky to have QWERTYs every day past the first day, but the symbols and things were elsewhere and I keep going for them in the wrong places.

And that’s about it. I gotta go see the girls. This will have to do for my initial postmortem report. I’ll keep posting. Keep reading if you wish. I plan to integrate pictures into my daily posts...we’ll see how that goes over the next couple days. I’ll post an announcement if I do.

All for now. Buen Camino.