time

Many of the people I have met since I did my first Camino in 2017 tell me how much they want to do it. Most folks will never get around to walking it. Well, I am here to guide you.

What is your motivation to walk the Camino? In my case, I had dreamt about it for years, but it took my father’s passing for me to finally commit. Maybe you have heard from a few pilgrims that it was a cool experience? Or maybe you have a higher motivation. Although it is bad Camino etiquette to ask pilgrims why they are walking (it is none of your business, you can read more pointers here), most folks do it in between jobs, after college, to “find themselves.”

You 100% should walk the Camino. For clarity, for healing, for your mental, spiritual, and physical health, to get to know the country in a way not even Spaniards know, for culture: history, architecture, art, food, etc., to disconnect from civilization (you are not walking the Appalachian trail), but just walking for hours on end each day means that you are not looking at a screen for those hours, and yes, for fun.

Your first task is committing, maybe therein lies the issue.

Your next step is to figure out how much time you have. For the full enchilada, you are going to need thirty something days. Or you can do a shorter Camino like the Primitivo which will take you around 12 days. Any less and you are really cheating yourself out of the transformative experience that is the Camino. Sure, you only need to walk 100 km (62 miles) -less than a week- to get your Camino certificate, your Compostela, but if you are walking the Camino to hang a certificate on your wall, you might as well just go to Disney World.

Once you know how much time you have, take a look at all the different Caminos, you can start in Paris, Geneva, Madrid, Lisbon, Bordeaux, you name it. The Camino starts at your doorstep.

Money. The Camino in Spain is relatively inexpensive. You can get away at 30 Euros a day. You will need more if you want to stay in hotels instead of Albergues, and much more if you are going to walk in France or anywhere else in Europe. On the other hand you will need much less if you camp and/or if you make all your own meals.

Then you make your travel plans: planes, trains, buses, whatever.

And your equipment, there are a million YouTube videos on this, even I have written about it here.

That’s it, you are on your way, Buen Camino!

Of course I have mentioned coffee many times before in this blog, but I have never dedicated a post to it. About bloody time, some of you might say.

As my friend Theo would say I am a bit of a late bloomer, at least on the coffee front, maybe because I did not hit my teenage years in Madrid but in London in the 80’s where a good cup of coffee was as unheard of as a sunny day. Ditto for university in Boston later that same decade. Although I do remember some memorable coffees in the Italian North End where a few cafés knew how to pull a solid espresso!

When I finally got back to Spain in the early 90’s, still young -mind you- then the coffee consumption crept in unannounced. You see, in Spain at mid morning everybody takes a coffee break, who was I not to enjoy a cup? Thus an addiction began.

I do not drink a lot of coffee, preferring to focus on quality over quantity. Normally it is just one a day, mid morning. While travelling, it will be at least a couple, one with breakfast and one mid morning. If I have lunch out, I might have an espresso to finish.

During my PhD, I would meet with my awesome Thesis Advisor a couple of times a week to go over my progress at UNC’s now defunct The Daily Grind, where they knew our orders by heart. Those coffees remain in my memory as some of the most enriching ever.

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons

– T.S. Eliot

Relative to the rest of Europe, Spain does not have the best coffee. You see after our Civil War (1936 to 39) we had a rough famine through the 40’s while the rest of Europe was in WWII. We were lucky to be included in the Marshall Plan that helped us out. We had a scarcity of coffee so it was over roasted to increase flavor. Folks also drank chicory instead of coffee since this grows naturally in Spain and was widely available and much cheaper. Sometimes they mixed coffee and chicory (in proportions depending on what you could afford). A final trick was to add caramel to the coffee, again to push the flavor. All this means is that we got used to bad coffee, torrefacto. Nowadays this is not so much the case except if you go to a remote village where they still like it “old” style.

Another great coffee moment is Sunday after church, where I do not have any time limit on my coffee. In Florida I would go to Bad Ass Coffee next to St. Ann’s, although eventually I moved to The Brick for the more comfy sofas to read on. Here in Madrid I go to the wonderful Pancomido Café where the girls know me enough to prepare my coffee when they see me walking in!

More important than the coffee itself might be the coffee time: a time of reflection, or reading, or of company, and conversation. The ceremony of coffee whether at home, or at a coffee shop is also equally important; taking the time to enjoy a coffee alone or with a friend.