Getting to the Starting Line

A Camino Adventure

Back in the olden days, I ran marathons, making it all the way to the finish line a couple of times. That sounds impressive to some people, but I’d suggest that getting to the starting line is underrated. I started training for six different marathons, but only made it to starting line for two of them. The race itself is 3 or 4 hours of effort, but to get there is weeks and weeks of work. For me at least, less than half of my original attempts were successful. Things break down along the way — sometimes the body, sometimes the will.

I was reflecting on that a bit today as we journeyed to the starting line of our Camino hike this time. Getting to the starting line of a hike like this has some training. (We put in a lot more training miles for previous hikes than we have for this one — we’re hoping for some muscle memory to kick in.) But to commit to this hike, you commit to a pretty taxing commute to get to the starting line. It takes a toll on the body, and at one point today (or was that yesterday?) I wondered if my will was breaking (more on that anon).

Our commute began Sunday morning at about 11, when we set off for the airport. It’s about a 40 minute drive from our house to get to the nearest commercial airport — the South Bend International airport (SBN). That sounds like it should be a good starting point for a trip abroad, but I think the only international flight was one to the Bahamas some years back, simply so they could give it that impressive name. Lots of people from our area will drive to Chicago’s O’Hare for big trips like this, as it can usually save you a leg. But I’m in the camp that thinks the ease of getting in and out of SBN makes up for that. You pull up next to the terminal, less than 100m to security, and it took 2 minutes to get through to our gate. So that was easy.

There were people at the airport returning from Texas, where the night before Notre Dame had a solid performance beating A&M in the college football season opener. So there was a jolly vibe in the air at SBN. In fact on our flight, there was a guy behind us wearing a ND football polo, and he said he was on the team flight that got back at 5am that morning (and he was in a middle seat between “two very large humans who didn’t give much of the armrests” for that flight), and now after 4 hours of sleep, he was off on a “friend-raising” trip. That’s an adventure I’m not sure I know much about.

Delta is the airline easiest to use from SBN. You can go to Atlanta, Detroit, or Minneapolis and connect to about anywhere. This time, it was Atlanta. I fly enough that it makes sense (and cents) for me to get one of those credit cards that gives you some perks — upgraded seats and the Delta lounges. This time I paid for one coach ticket, and then through earned miles and the various incentives that come with the card, the two of us got bumped up to the first class seats 2a and 2b (which hardly matters in the little planes that fly out of South Bend), and then chilled at the international Delta lounge for 90 minutes with all the food and drink we could handle.

Upgrades on international flights are harder to come by, so we had to settle for comfort plus in 21b and 21c, which gives you an extra inch of leg room and puts you close enough to first class that you have constant fits of envy for those “lie flat” beds they get for the overnight flight. I don’t sleep so well in normal circumstances, so in these circumstances I might as well not even try. I did try, though, with a new neck pillow and two shots of scotch, but alas, I think I could recount pretty well every minute of the 9 hour flight. I passed the time watching some silly things, and then I noticed on someone else’s screen several rows ahead of me, Martin Sheen, in the movie he did about walking the Camino! So of course I watched that. We had seen it five or so years ago when Chris was preparing for her first hike over here. Watching it again, it is pretty realistic, so for those of you who don’t know much about the adventure it is to hike the Camino, your time might be better spent watching The Way than reading my chronicle! But don’t leave yet. I have some stories.

Seated in 21a was burly man with a long white goatee. I asked him what he’s going to Spain for and he said, “To change planes for one going to the Canary Islands.” Whoa. So what are you doing there? He doesn’t really seem like the kind of guy who might chill at a Sandals Resort. “Getting a boat” he says, not offering many details. But I keep pressing, and eventually I get out of him the story that he works for a supply company for off-shore oil drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. They needed a new boat, which I think he called a “mud boat”, for running out supplies from the shore to the people manning the rigs, “so they can keep drilling oil for us.” I almost quipped that maybe if he didn’t do his job so well, they’d quit drilling oil and we’d be forced to transition to a better energy source… but I bit my tongue. It seemed as though the hesitancy he had in giving details was a perceived ideological difference that he felt with most people on the plane and didn’t really want to get into it with us. And it would be a tad hypocritical for me to make a speech about the evils of oil while flying across the ocean! So I just tried to sound interested in his work. “You’re coming over here to get a boat, and then you’re going to take it back across the Atlantic?” “Yep, with a crew of 7.” And how long does that take? “28 days if the weather holds.” Wow. That’s another adventure about which I know very little.

The only photo I took today was outside the window of 21a while the sun was coming up.

We landed in Madrid and cruised through immigration and customs. But I couldn’t get my phone to start working with Spanish internet (are the 1s and 0s different over here?). I’ve tended to get these eSim cards that download to your phone when I travel internationally. For $10 you get all the data you need for a couple of weeks. My Google Fi phone service was going to be $100 more to use it over here, because every phone on the plan has to upgrade to the international plan. And now that I’m a Mennonite, I just can’t bring myself to do that (to be honest, I couldn’t have done it before I was a Mennonite… which might explain at least part of why I became a Mennonite!). We had to take a train from the airport to the central train station in Madrid, and it was a really weird and stressful feeling doing that without any internet on my phone. Where are we now? Are we going the right direction?? That kind of anxiety might be a sign that I need to cut the cord to the virtual world for a longer stretch. It wasn’t that long ago that we relied on paper maps and asking directions from strangers to get us from place to place. I’m not sure I like that we don’t do that anymore, but we can’t go back.

There was no WiFi on the train, so my good wife talked me down from the ledge of despair that this whole trip was a disaster. She probably has a better perspective on such things because she is a little older — a fact that I can mention today because it is her birthday. Happy Birthday to my beloved! Her birthday was the cause of this adventure (if I wouldn’t have gone on so much already about the minutiae of traveling, I’d pause for a philosophy lecture about final causes, because that’s what her birthday was for this trip). I feel very blessed to be married to someone who wants to do stuff like this for her big birthday celebration (this is not an every year sort of birthday celebration… it’s a big one… but I have enough sense not to say here just which big one it is!).

We sat at the train station for two hours, because I was too nervous to walk around much without my internet. Then we got onto the next big train, for a 5 hr ride north. I was sure it would have WiFi. It didn’t. But somehow I pushed the right buttons in the right order to get the internet on my phone working. That was a relief, because I wasn’t sure about the directions for our next leg, which was supposed to be a smaller commuter train that would take us to the starting point of this adventure. But then the closer we got to Santander on the northern coast of Spain, the foggier and rainier it got. We were tired and cranky enough by the time we got there to spring for a taxi cab to take us the last 20 minutes to the room we have for the night. The Camino path is 50m outside our window.

At the end of a commute like that and you finally make it into your room, you do a little dance and feel like you’ve won the lottery. It was about 7pm when we got here. Of course the WiFi isn’t working, but I can hotspot from my phone to get the iPad going for this! We were too tired to wait for the restaurants to open, so I walked up the hill to what supposed to be a supermarket. It was less than the half the size of a typical 7-11, but it had bread, cheese, apples, Magnum bars, and a small box of vino tinto. So we feel like we are living large.

I went into the day thinking I know what this adventure will be like. But of course it is the essence of adventure that I’m probably wrong about that. So I will end this paragraph too with admitting that I don’t know much about what is in store for us in this adventure.