My Camino Packing List

How much do you want to carry?

We leave on Sunday for Spain to pick up where we left off last time (to relive that trip, find the posts by scrolling down a ways on the Stump Speeches home page) walking the northern route of the Camino de Santiago. That will be just outside of the city of Santander, and we’ll head west along the Bay of Biscay past Oviedo until we get to the airport. We’ve contracted with our feet for transportation services, and with our backs for freight. We know there are other people who walk, but pay a company to transport their luggage to the next stop. I usually joke with them that they don’t get as much time out of Purgatory when they do it that way (it’s mostly a joke… perhaps I’ll write more about the part that maybe isn’t at some point). Regardless of the purported eternal consequences, we find it very satisfying to take only what we can carry.

I suppose that’s not quite right. I can carry quite a bit. The better question is how much do I want to carry? There is a rule of thumb that says you should only carry 10% of you body weight. I feel funny telling you exactly what I weigh in easily comprehensible units, but I don’t mind saying I nudge the UK scale up to about 12.8 stones. I’ve decided to push the rule of thumb a bit (whose thumbs are those, anyway?), and set my pack weight limit at 20 lbs.

This trip is less complicated than my previous ones to the Camino. Before, I had other public events I was part of, and so had to pack things that would work for those too. This time, all we’re doing is hiking, and then going to the Montserrat monastery outside of Barcelona. I’ve decided not to take my tunic, scapular, and cowl to try blending in there, and instead assume that the monks will be fine with me wearing my hiking clothes.

Every afternoon when you arrive at your stop, you shower and wash out the day’s hiking clothes. But it is nice to have another set to put on, rather than standing there naked waiting for them to dry (sorry for the imagery), and maybe a spare just in case. And you have to plan for cold and warm, wet and dry. So here’s my list of clothing:

• Three pairs of underwear and socks

• 2 pairs hiking shorts, 1 pair lounging/swimming shorts

• 3 short sleeve shirts

• 2 long sleeve hiking shirts,

• 1 light-weight thermal shirt, 1 lounging long-sleeve

• 1 pair long hiking pants, 1 light-weight sweat pants

• Rain jacket

• Hiking shoes, sandals

Of course we have to take more than just clothing. I have a bag of first aid things — bandaids, Advil PM, gauze, etc. Then another bag of toiletries. And then a bag of cords and an adapter to charge my phone, my watch, sleeping earbuds, and my iPad.

The iPad is a significant weight commitment — 2.6 lbs, or more than 10% of my budget. It doesn’t really save much weight over my laptop, but I’m not sure it’s a good idea to traipse around with my work laptop in my bag for security reasons (what could happen? I can think of lots of things… for example, I get kidnapped and they forcibly put my index finger onto the button that reads my identity, and then the kidnappers start changing things on the BioLogos website to say we’ve decided that the Earth is flat.). And there is a psychological issue of distancing myself for work for a couple of weeks. The iPad has a keyboard case for protection and for ease of typing, and that ends up weighing a good deal more than it seems like it should.

Then another luxury I’ve indulged in for this trip is my bamboo sheet sleep sack. That weighs in at another 2.5 lbs, but it was a lesson learned from last time on the trail (as detailed here). Those Europeans love their duvets, which seem like they’d be very cozy in the winter time. But I sleep on the warmish side and can’t understand why you’d want a thick cover on you in September. My sleep sack is cooling, calming, wicking, and practically sings you a lullaby.

Tossing in a few other sundries (like two hats) plus the weight of the pack itself, and I’m at 17.5 lbs. That sounds very nice. But… I have yet accounted for carrying water. I have two collapsable 650 ml water bottles. As we all remember from learning the metric system (!), a ml of distilled water weighs 1 gram. For the purposes of simplicity for this explanation, I’m going to ignore the weight of whatever else is in non-distilled water I’ll be drinking (though now I’m wondering whether that makes the water heavier or lighter?? All depends on whether those molecules of minerals weigh more or less than the volume of water molecules they displace by being in there.) So if I carry both bottles full up, and covert the units to the more intuitive system of weights that was probably based on how much the king’s cat weighed, each bottle plus the water weighs about 2 lbs (and that unit of weight is helpfully abbreviated with letters nowhere appearing in the word). So 4 lbs of water takes me over my self-imposed limit, which was already over the rule of thumb. What to do?

Well of course I’ll be drinking water from the bottles throughout the day, so the weight there will decreasing… but does that really help if that weight simply moves from the container on my pack, to the container in my gut which is less than a foot away?? If I’m going just by the numbers, it makes my body weight heavier, which actually gives me more capacity in the 10% rule of thumb for carrying weight. And the weight I’m carrying goes down, so with every sip I’m more in line with where I ought to be! But that feels like gaming the system, rather than resulting in any easier walking (and it doesn’t seem prudent to just guzzle a whole bottle first thing, to get my pack weight under 20 lbs). To get this scenario really dialed in, I guess I also need to know the rate that my body processes the water and releases it through sweating or through my bladder. I’ll keep you posted.

We leave tomorrow and will be carried by planes, trains, and busses before we get to the starting point in Santander. Then it’s just our feet and our backs with the stripped down kit (plus my iPad and cushy sleep sack). Sounds like a recipe for character building, whether or not it results in eternal benefits.