Why I Randomly Decided to Walk 777 kilometers Across Spain

I didn’t know what el Camino de Santiago was a month ago. Now I’m on a plane to France.

I’m currently sitting in the 34th row of flight LH 1550 to Biarritz, France. A German man has just taken his next to me and already stolen the armrest. Since I’m at the window and he’s stuck in the middle I suppose I’ll let him have it.

I’ll start with the “who.” I’m Jane Miller, a rising junior in college who is about to embark on el Camino de Santiago.

El Camino de Santiago is a series of ancient routes across Spain, ending at the Cathedral of Saint James. It’s been used for centuries as a religious pilgrimage, some individuals embarking on it willingly, while others at the instruction of religious and political authorities. Oftentimes the route was taken by criminals who opted for a month of walking instead of jail time, or sinners who wished to reduce their time in purgatory. The usual medieval drill.

Today people complete el Camino (the “way”) for a multitude of reasons. Religion, fitness, personal growth, you name it.

Side bar the German guy just opened a bag of chips and is chewing them SO LOUDLY I can hardly focus.

Anyways, so I guess I’ve now covered the “what” and the “where”, and the “how” is pretty obvious (I just fly there and start walking) All that’s left now is the “why.”

I’m not even sure if I have a good answer for that yet so I guess now might be a good time to come up with one. I’ve got my dying AirPods, a bottle of water, my fanny pack, and 10 hours to ponder this absolutely necessary question.

If German dude could just finish his bag of cool ranch Doritos already this process would go a lot faster.

I wonder if it’s really important to come up with a solid reason for doing the things we do. Maybe our desire to do certain things can’t always be articulated. Sometimes we just get called to do something and we go ahead and do it.

I also think that when people talk about why they did something their answers are often skewed by what the results of said thing were. If it ended badly people act like they were confused or misguided when they made the decision, but if it ended well then it’s a completely different story. To exclude the possibility of any positive or negative outcomes of this journey influencing the way I characterize its events, I am going to recount my travels and upload them to this blog as they occur. I will tell the story of my camino exactly as it happens, not as it happened. Well I’ll probably do that too later on because I’m obsessed with writing about my experiences, but that’s beside the point.

I want to give you, reader, my experience with all of the painful, beautiful, and frustrating emotions that I encounter along the way. I will post these stories on no particular schedule or timeline, but all within the 4–6 week Camino timeline.

Back to the “why”. To be honest, I had no idea that el Camino existed prior to last month. My cousin Teresa told me over Easter that she was going on a pilgrimage across Spain as a post-grad trip with her friend and a few other girls she didn’t know super well. She told me that I should come too, probably assuming I would say no.

Luckily for her, I had absolutely no career-directed plans this summer and a “why not” life philosophy, so their group of five soon became six.

My non-career-related summer plan was what I did all throughout my high-school summers, coaching competitive swimming. It’s something I really enjoy, and I was pretty excited about doing it again. However, when I heard about the Camino, I kind of just knew I had to do it. A random opportunity like that being thrown into my lap in a time when I felt like my life was directionless and my summer plans were already nowhere close to being considered career-oriented… it was perfect. It was spontaneous. It was me.

It was also something I felt like I probably needed.

The university I go to, everyone is pretty on-it when it comes to getting internships and even post-grad jobs lined up. A number of my friends already know the banks they’ll be working for after college. My problem is that I have no idea what I want to do with my life, so I can’t make myself commit to anything.

“When I had journeyed half of our life’s way, I found myself within a shadowed forest, for I had lost the path that does not stray.”

-Dante, Inferno

To be clear, I’m nowhere near half my life’s way and I’m not planning on venturing into the nine levels of hell to find myself. The bottom line is that I’m at a point in my life where I kind of feel completely lost, and I’m hoping that embarking on a certain journey will help me with my own. I don’t need to know one hundred percent who I am or where my future lies, I just want to find a little confidence that I’ll be okay.

As a Catholic, I think a lot of these problems can be addressed through my relationship with God. I talk to him every day, it’s true, but I feel like the physical difficulty of this pilgrimage, the people I meet along the way, and the places I visit (especially the churches) will bring me closer to him in ways that I never could have imagined before.

I am excited yet terrified about the physical challenge that el Camino will present me with. Since I only committed to doing this 2 weeks ago I have done absolutely no training. I’m fit but definitely not fit enough to evade significant pain on the first day, which is notoriously the most grueling out of the entire journey. For context I am doing the Camino Frances, the most difficult route out of all the paths to Santiago, adding up to about 777 kilometers. We start in Biarritz, France and end in Santiago, Spain. I believe the first day involves us climbing over a mountain range (I’m honestly not entirely sure I’m kind of just going with the flow) and I think it’s the longest we will have to walk in a single day; somewhere around 20 miles.

Lord have mercy.

You’re probably wondering about the logistics of this all, like where we’ll be staying and how much we bring, so I’ll revisit the “how”. Every night we stay in hostels, and you carry everything on your back. I only brought the bare necessities: two pairs of clothes, a toothbrush, sunscreen, baseball cap, etc. I’m hoping that this experience will teach me how to live with less things. If there’s one thing that moving out of my dorm this year taught me, it’s that I have too much crap that I don’t need and don’t even use.

German guy just offered me a piece of chocolate and now I feel bad for being so annoyed with him earlier. See, these are the kind of virtues I’m hoping to cultivate on the Camino: A cooler temper, some charitability, and empathy. The greatest gift God ever gave us was each other, and from what I understand, I’ll probably be interacting with an assortment of characters on this journey.

Never mind, German guy is on the outs again. His arm isn’t even on the arm rest anymore, it is quite literally on top of mine. PERSONAL SPACE, BUDDY. ITS NOT THAT HARD.

So maybe I’ve got some more growth to do than I thought. Can’t wait to do it on el Camino, and can’t wait to tell you all about it.