We're All a Little Odd

The Camino has a way of reminding me how quickly curiosity can become judgment.

By 1 p.m. only one pilgrim had arrived at the Camino hostel at which I’m volunteering this week.

This could be because:

• It got to 104 degrees here in Estella, Spain yesterday. Not too many pilgrims want to walk the Camino in this kind of weather!

• Most pilgrims who stay in hostels look for the cheapest one. Ours is 12 Euros for the night. The municipal hostel is 8 Euros.

• We are a few minutes walk off the main Camino route. Most pilgrims prefer something as close to the Camino as possible and the municipal albergue (hostel) is on the route.

I like volunteering at Camino hostels for the camaraderie. But how much of that would I get with just one pilgrim? Well, it would turn out quite a bit!

Our guest last night was Michel — a Frenchman from a town just outside Bordeaux.

He’s actually not going to Santiago de Compostela; he’s headed in the exact opposite direction!

Why?

Because he and five others just rode Mobylettes (1960s French mopeds) from Bordeaux to Santiago de Compostela—over 1100 km (684 miles) to commemorate the 1984 voyage done the same way and to celebrate 40 years of their local Friends of the Camino association.

After all the fanfare of their arrival (you can see a news clip about them here), the Mobylettes were put in a van, Michel grabbed a backpack, and started his walk back to Bordeaux. He has walked dozens of Caminos, but never the most popular route—the Camino Francés.

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One of my jobs as a volunteer is to give each pilgrim who arrives a stamp in their Camino credential. Each country has its own and over the course of my years of volunteering I’ve seen ones from a variety of countries. But this is the first time I’ve seen a Camino credential that someone made personally thanks to ChatGPT!

For their vintage moped ride, Michel made this one:

And now for his Camino “in reverse” he made this one:

By the time 2 p.m. came and went I was hoping we wouldn’t see any more pilgrims—not because I didn’t want the camaraderie but because I hoped no one was still walking the Camino in the 100 degree temperatures.

But at 8 p.m., I got a call. “Can I make a reservation for tonight?”

“Tonight? There’s no need! We have plenty of beds.”

And so it was that J arrived 20 minutes later. She told her story to Michel—but in French, which I can usually understand. But her story was a bit convoluted so I later asked Michel if I heard it correctly.

Indeed I had.

J had taken a cab to our albergue from a town 10km away. She was wondering if she should take a cab back to that point again tomorrow so as not to miss any of the Camino.

Why had she arrived at 8pm? It wasn’t clear.

When I went to stamp her credential, I saw she her last stamp was from Roncesvalles — which meant she hadn’t gotten any Camino stamps in the last 4 days. She also asked about how one gets Camino stamps, which I thought an odd thing not to know if she’d been on the route for five days.

Michel volunteers at the Camino hostel in his town in France. So we’ve both seen some unusual things. Was J really walking the Camino? Or was she actually one of those people who, for whatever reason, decide to live on the Camino for a while? She talked about camping her first two nights, which is common among the 20-something Camino crowd, but J was 50.

“It seems a bit odd,” Michel said to me. “But we’re all a little odd.”

Indeed we are.

The next morning, J left in the Birkenstock clogs in which she’d arrived—not the ideal walking shoe, but who am I to judge?

And this is perhaps one of the reasons I return to the Camino year after year: to be reminded of these important life lessons. How often do I build a story about someone based on only a few pieces of information? How often do those stories become judgement?

Is there a place in your life you making a judgement based on very few details?

With love,

Rebecca