And now a final Camino post, to share a few things we learned on our big walk.

Henry Higgins was wrong.  We only had two days of consistent rain and a few days with showers.  On a 40 day walk at this time of year in northern Spain, that’s extraordinary.  But the striking green and obvious fertility of the land reveals the undeniable truth – the rain in Spain does not fall mainly on the plain.

It pays to take the road less travelled.  Robert Frost wrote “I took the road less travelled and that has made all the difference”.

Jerry Seinfeld said “Sometimes the road less travelled is less traveled for a reason”.  Just occasionally,  Seinfeld was right.

But if this is the road more travelled…

We’d trade off a bit of mud, one attack of ticks and some sketchy waymarkings for the solitude, the coastal walking, and the sheer beauty of the Norte any day.  Frost was definitely right.  Taking the road less travelled made all the difference for us.

As John Denver sang “Some days are diamonds.  Some days are stones”.  If you walk anywhere for 40 days, not every day will be a stunner.  But if the diamond days vastly outnumber the others, you quickly forget the not so perfect ones.

It’s really a series of day walks.  Taoist philosopher Lao Zhu said “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”.   John said, “871km is about 1,161,000 steps”.  Our feet whispered, “Don’t listen to Lao Zhu.  Buses didn’t exist in his day”.  But they proved him right and stayed strong to the end.

John should not be entrusted with ordering food in a foreign language.  A chorizo is a sausage.

A churro is a sweet pastry, like a crispy donut, encrusted with sugar, usually eaten after dipping them into hot chocolate thick enough to be a sauce.

Left alone while Julie made a phone call, John managed to order churros with fried eggs for breakfast.  Clearly, the waiter was either too polite to question this odd pairing or too used to foreigners making weird requests.

Language lessons.  John’s breakfast fail aside, we learned many new Spanish words.  Mostly just by adding ‘o’.

That’s understandable when it comes to things that didn’t exist when the Spanish language was being developed, like telephones and electricity.  But surely even the ancient Spaniards had a word for this.

Finding the shop you need in Spain is simple.  But not always.  Of course, a chocolateria sells chocolate, and a perfumeria sells perfume.

Sadly, a ferreteria doesn’t sell ferrets.

The Camino isn’t just for young people.  Maybe it’s because it’s retirees who have the time to walk for six weeks, but most of the walkers on the Norte were Boomers or similar.  Some were even older than John!

Everyone’s Camino is unique.  We started out thinking there was ‘a’ Norte route.  But on many days there are different options – the ‘old’ Camino or new paths where the old way is now a road, higher vs lower terrain variants, coastal vs inland trails.  Walkers stop for the night in different villages, some walk longer distances per day than others.  So by the end, no two walkers will have taken the same route or had the same experience.  Unless, like us, you are walking together.  There isn’t ‘a’ Camino or ‘the’ Camino, only our Camino.

Before we left Australia, quite a few people asked “Why are you doing this?”  We struggled to answer that.  And having done it, we’re still not really sure.  What we can say is that as long days of walking spool out with the end too far in the future to contemplate, there’s a real opportunity to think, to live in the moment and to engage with the landscape in a way that doesn’t happen on shorter or more peopled walks.  Would we do it again?  No.  That’s our Camino done.  But would we do a similar walk elsewhere?  Absolutely.  Already we hear the siren call of long distance trails in other parts of Europe.   But for now, it’s time for sangria, tapas and a nice lie down.