Deciding to Walk El Camino de Santiago

When I first decided to embark on this trip around-the-world, one of the first things I obviously had to figure out was where to start. A 500-mile Catholic pilgrimage through Spain might not be the obvious choice for a 30-year-old gay atheist but it was for me.

I first learned about the Camino during my hike to Machu Picchu with my mom for her 60th birthday, It seemed intriguing but very much out of reach because, well, it was. Unless you want to do a week at a time for 4-5 years, there isn’t a practical way for most working Americans to walk the Camino. One of the best parts about backpacking is that you can do the sorts of trips that you could never do while working because you have the luxury of time.

There are many different routes for the Camino but they all end in Santiago de Compostela. The most popular route is the Camino Francés or “The French Way.” It was popularized in the Emilio Estevez film The Way but numbers have been growing at a staggering rate for years now. Each years hundreds of thousands of people walk this route that starts in France at Saint Jean Pied de Port. That’s not the route I chose.

El Norte or “The Northern Way” starts in Irün and follows the Northern coast through Basque country. It’s more scenic but also more difficult route than the Camino Francés. There are fewer places to stop and fewer pilgrims. In this case I literally opted to take the road less traveled and chose El Norte for my Camino.

That trip to Machu Picchu was a turning point in my relationship with my mother. It was our first of many times traveling together and I got to experience her as a fully-grown adult. Or, more accurately, she got to experience me as a fully-grown adult. She was impressed by my abysmal Spanish that got us around Lima and appreciated my navigational skills.

There’s nothing in the world I would like more than to get to do this walk with my mom. In so many ways she was the perfect pilgrim. She happily talked to strangers, sometimes eliciting startlingly intimate details from them. On our Machu Picchu hike she doled out moleskin to all of the blistered hikers in an extremely maternal moment. She wanted to the Camino, but she can’t, which is why I want to do it in her memory.