Many of you know the history, but in case not, a very brief summary: The Camino de Santiago de Compostela is an ancient Catholic pilgrimage route, the goal being the Cathedral in Santiago where the bones of St. James (Sant Iago) are supposedly interred. At the time it started to become popular in the 9th Century, there were three principal pilgrimage destinations--Jerusalem, Rome, and Santiago. After the Crusades, Rome and Santiago became the biggest games in town. Feeder routes from France, Switzerland, Germany, and other parts of Europe developed, many leading across the Pyrenees to the route I'm on now, the Camino Frances, the last 500 miles on the way to Santiago. Towns and villages grew up along the way in the ensuing centuries to support the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims that undertook the journey each year, and eventually four large large cathedral cities emerged and evolved, Pamplona, Burgos, Leon, and of course Santiago.

People undertook the pilgrimage for a variety of reasons. Devotion, penance, and redemption, in lieu of prison (hence the tradition of stamping the pilgrim passport to prove one actually made the journey), for economic opportunity, and surely for a host of other reasons. Many pilgrims in the medieval era reputedly had only four possessions, a heavy cape to protect against the weather (I assume some sort of undergarment was worn, but that's just a guess), leather sandals, sometimes with wooden soles, an eight foot wooden walking stick, and a large gourd attached to the stick for carrying water. It was a very risky undertaking and many people perished along the route, and there are remains of early pilgrim hospitals and cemeteries all along the way. Mock funerals were sometimes held before the pilgrims left their home towns because it seemed likely they wouldn't return.

People today do it for a variety of reasons as well, though most are carrying high tech clothes and backpacks and smart phones and iPads with which they access the Internet via wifi virtually everywhere along the route, and then they fly back home instead of turning around and retracing their steps. Folks today do it as a spiritual quest, to test their bodies and endurance, because they're history or architecture or art lovers, because they want to see what it's like to walk across an entire country, or as tourists because it's now a popular thing to do. Most people undertake it during a transitional period of their lives, after the death of a spouse, after or even during an illness, upon graduating college, in the midst of a change in career, at retirement. I suppose there are some devout Catholics who do it in the original spirit, but they seem to be a small minority of those on the path.

And there's nothing like walking 13 miles with a blister to get one wondering "Why the hell am I doing this?".

Highlights of today's walk: Crossing the famous and beautifully proportioned thousand year old bridge on the way out of Puente la Reina, a town where two pilgrimage routes converge, the Camino Frances and the Camino Aragonese. Approaching the town of Cirauqui, which could be seen from different perspectives over quite a distance; the sky was generally overcast but often the town's buildings were eerily lit by the sun breaking through the clouds. And arriving in Estella, a town with lofty churches and fortifications, walking over its own dramatic stone pedestrian bridge, and finding our beautiful and luxurious hotel, just across from one of those fortifications.

Starting tomorrow, I'll be taking a three day break from the Camino. Terry's five days of walking are done and we'll be traveling by bus to Burgos tomorrow, spend the next day there, and then she'll go on to Madrid and fly home and I'll return to Estella where I'll restart my Camino. The experience will change for sure. It'll be a solitary rather than a shared one. I'm looking forward to it with both excitement and a bit of trepidation...