Welcome the log of my Via de la Plata Pilgrim trek. When in 1994 I told my mother that I planned to take a bicycle trip across Spain, she wisely counseled me, “then you will have to follow the Camino to Santiago de Compostela.” I knew nothing about the Camino then but it has been shaping my experience of the World ever since. From Barcelona that summer I was to pedal across the Pyrenees and follow the Camino to Santiago but the idea of walking as a Pilgrim had taken hold. By late July of the current year when I set foot from Seville on the Via de la Plata for Santiago, I could call myself a veteran Pilgrim. I had walked the Camino Francés to Santiago with a teaching colleague in 2007 and in 2009 had walked the “Way of St. Olav” pilgrim route across Norway to the “KristKirke” Cathedral in Trondheim. People with a history like mine are likely to be veterans of many a conversation devoted to identifying just who is a Pilgrim and what a proper Pilgrim’s motivations are likely to be. I will say only that Pilgrimage is a transformative experience. As Pilgrim sage Bodvar Schelderup might suggest, while a Pilgrim is always on his way home, a Pilgrim is never the same upon returning. I hope you enjoy my account of forty days and nights afoot a Pilgrim in Spain during the summer of 2010.
A Pilgrim’s heart is his travel guide. But before you begin allow me to offer you a few words in explanation. About forty log posts follow, each complemented by one or more photo images. Double click on an image if you wish to expand it to full screen. Click on “Older Posts” at the foot of each page until there are no more. The post content is largely text written on postcards dispatched to family and friends from the Pilgrim Road. And Sly, or more particularly “Buffalo Jump Sly”, was my nomme de guerre during five magical months in 2002 when I was “thru hiking” the 3,450 kilometer grandfather of American trails, the “Appalachian Trail”.
Enjoy the Pilgrim’s Tale.
