First day on Camino

This is a part of Spain that no one sees. Small towns, car dealerships, highways running along the Via de la Plata of the Camino de Santiago. Honestly, I don't know much about this road other than it is one of the five traditional pilgrim routes that the apostle James (a.k.a. "Santiago") took while bringing Christianity to Spain, yet I am not sure why there are five. Ours, the Via de la Plata, starts in Sevilla and directs us via yellow arrows through Andalucía, Extremadura, all the way up to Santiago. The yellow arrows are over everything, on street signs, on old rubble beside the rural roads, a simple yellow like three sloppy strokes of a paintbrush pointing us forward.

In a way this is much like the Pilgrimage for Peace with Rachel. By saying this I do not mean by any stretch that I am as hardcore as Rachel and those folks, mostly in middle age or later, who committed to the 50-day, 1000-mile walk, sharing the message of peace twice a day with community centers, schools, churches, and throughout the day with the common folk on the road. I'm not even as hardcore as the people who joined for one more day than I did, but I relate in that, as people see us walking, they cheer us on. It seems every few cars are proud of us, honking and waving, and that small towns know exactly what we are no matter from what culture. Merav is right, there's something about peregrinos, those pilgrims that the road draws, that local people strongly respect.

This rapport with the locals proves very advantageous to us in Santiponce, fourteen kilometers away from our destination. When the deluge comes, as it does for us in Spain, we realize how foreign this part of Spain is to such water from the heavens. Their architecture includes almost no overhangs, and we duck into a church, into restaurant door wells, and anything that will keep us dry. Even in the rain, though, people are friendly, one man shielding Ryan and me with his umbrella talking about this and that while our rucksacks and a distant Merav were continuing to get soaked. He told us about a woman in the middle of the town who lived alone and welcomes pilgrims, so, after some wandering and trying to find free bedding at an old monastery (which is closed), we get back to the center of town, where several women tell us to find this Carmen. We knock on her door and get no answer, so I ask the barkeep two doors down, and, instead of getting the phone number like I asked, he walks us to the house, and bangs loud enough to bring Carmen to the door. She is old and smiley and brings us in. We have to pay, and it's expensive for the Camino, but we were willing to pay much more to get dry on such a day. We watch Inglourious Basterds, stretch our sore limbs, and stretch our clothes out to dry after a very good day.

Read more about the Pilgrimage for Peace either here: http://walkaboutpilgrims.blogspot.com/2009/11/zigzag-back-through-these-states.html

or here: http://peacewalk-newengland.com/