Day 10 on the Camino: Looking Silly to Stay Cool
A scorcher of a pavement-forward half day of walking from Logroño to Navette, where my inner weather turned glacial.
In 2023, I walked 500 miles on the Camino de Santiago on a grief pilgrimage. As I approach my next journey—a 100 day writing pilgrimage across the U.S.—I find myself reflecting again on those long summer days in Spain.
This photo journal series is a result of that, a kind of visual love letter to the Way. Start with Day 1 here if you missed it.
May it serve as a reminder to practice presence and care for all that arises along our paths.
Day 10 on the Camino
Date:
June 24, 2023
Start:
Logroño
End:
Navette
A good sleep! A buffet breakfast! Five coffees! Ohmygosh.
Having my own room the night before had paid off: I was able to travel deeply into the realm of REMs and felt so refreshed in the morning (the endless caffeine drip hadn't hurt).
Like I did in Pamplona, I took advantage of the later checkout time to write for a few hours. It was noon by the time I left, and hot! Once again, a yellow arrow led me astray because it led to a pilgrim hostel instead of being an actual Camino way-marker.
It took almost an hour to feel like I was finally out of Logrono, and it'd all been pavement (on top of being quite difficult to navigate at first with the endless signage everywhere).
My feet were not happy with me by the end of those ~2.6 miles.
It's wild to go through my notes and journals from this day. I almost can't believe how much "ground" I covered internally in such a short time—I reflected especially on the way the enormity of the pilgrimage was really sinking in that day. From my journal:
"It feels like time and space has been folder over and over again, like origami, and yet it's just been a week. How is this even possible?"
When I shared these thoughts with a pilgrim later, he laughed and said, "Sounds about right. It's like they say: this week has been a really long year."
I guess that's the magic of this experience, the invitation of a pilgrimage—to slow down and simplify things so much that you experience life totally differently. Maybe more as it's meant to be experienced. At least from the perspective of someone coming from a Western culture which values hustling and productivity over the things that actually matter.
So if that was my inner weather (which would experience a huge twist later), the outer weather was a lot simpler to summarize: HOT.
I could feel the heat radiating up from the cement as I walked, and I was so glad to have my sun umbrella, which made a huge difference. Even though I love a good sun hat (and had one), I preferred to walk with the umbrella. It not only blocks the sun from all of you and not just your head, but it also frees you up from anything having to be in contact with your head, which creates its own kind of heat while trying to also deflect it.
That said, a non-pilgrim biking by me at one point shouted “But it’s not even raining!” He said it with a big smile on his face, and I took no offense, but it made me chuckle. I imagine I must have looked a bit strange, walking with an umbrella on a perfectly sunny day.
Better to look silly to stay cool though, I thought. And I’m sure I chuckled again at my own cheesiness.
It was ultimately a slog of a day though, even with the umbrella, and I only did about a "half" stage because of my late start. Because I'd had such a good experience with a private room the night before, I'd done the same for today when I arrived to Navette. But the space I’d booked had a gloomy, sad vibe and lacked the communal spaces of both pilgrim hostels and other BNB or hotel options where you can often still connect with others.
In the end, it was actually a disappointing experience, and I'd wished I'd stayed at a hostel or somewhere else. But I also learned that you have to be careful about this kind of thinking and globbing onto it because there's no guarantee that the alternative (or one of many alternatives) would have been any better. There's just no way to know, and it’s not bad or wrong that this happened—it is simply what happened, and the best we can do is try to learn from it and move through it without beating ourselves up. This would be a theme for the entire 5 weeks I walked.
That said, I hadn’t really learned this lesson quite yet, so I globbed onto the sticky thoughts. Hard.
After getting settled in and showered, I wandered around the small town before dinner, stepping into a church to light a candle for Pipi and meditate, hoping it might lift me from the spiraling I was started to experience.
It didn’t.
The next few hours somehow led me to a darker and darker place, to the edge of loneliness and apathy that felt like a huge weight over my entire body. I couldn’t believe how slowly time was passing and how I had zero energy or interest in doing anything at all. What was going on?
I sat at the cafe where I had dinner and just waited for 8:00 pm to come, telling myself I’d go to sleep super early and then hopefully have a kind of reset the following morning.
To my surprise, while waiting for that time to arrive, I ended up connecting with a few other pilgrims who were spread out over a couple of different tables. At first, I felt wary of trying to be social after such a plummet in my mood, but in the end, I was so grateful for their company (and for not shutting down).
When asking them why they’d decided to walk the Camino, here’s what they shared:
18-year-old Lithuanian walking 50km a day: “It sounded like a nice walk.”
Mid-40s American woman: “It was either this or the couch.”
Mid-20s Australian woman: (sighs) “I’m sooo over this question.”
I guess I wasn’t the only one who’d let the heat get to her today.
Day 10 next. Stay tuned.
Buen Camino,
Katie
Walking in Awareness
Thinking of taking a pilgrimage of your own (no boots required)? My next course, The Inner Pilgrimage: A 100 Day Journey, begins in September. (The earlybird discount ends July 1st.)
Join me on Tuesdays in my free meditation group from 8:30-9:00 am PST. Sessions will be paused or sporadic starting in June during my 100 Day Writing Pilgrimage.
Find everything here.