20 km till breakfast

I am walking with the pilgrims of the Way of Saint James, the Camino de Santiago, through Northern Spain. We sleep in albergues, dormitory-style housing for pilgrims, some private, some sponsored by the local town government. Everyone gets up early, packs up their pack, puts on their boots, and heads out the door -- usually the people in charge want everyone out of there by 8:00 AM. And usually, there is breakfast somewhere in the picture. Either at the albergue or at the coffee shop down the block. In Zubiri, high in the Pyrenees Basque country, there would be breakfast at the local bar at 9:00, which seemed a long time to wait. So most of us headed down the trail, thinking there would be a cafe con leche and a pastry in the next town. We were soooo wrong! In this old-fashioned farming part of the world, coffee shops are just not done. Despite the fact that we were passing through four respectable sized towns, there was no coffee and no pastry.



The Spanish couple I had shared the table with the night before while we had a little supper told me that they usually had dinner at 11:00 PM, which made it possible for them to simply get up and go to work the next morning without breakfast. And so they did on this day, setting off aat 7:30 or so for their day on the trail. For those of us with the breakfast habit, it was a hard day. I had some leftover hard sausage and cheese, so there was at least something to eat at 10:30, when it became clear there would be nothing from the villages.



When several of us gathered at 2:00 in the next place we would stay overnight, it was time for comida, Spanish dinner. So we ate, and afterwards we had coffee, not the usual after-dinner cortado, but the breakfast cafe con leche. It had been 20 kilometers from getting out the door of the alberge to the first sip of coffee, way to long for my taste! But when a shorter version of this pre-breakfast walking began to happen a couple of days later, I was ready. The folks at the little store only six kilometers away were able to rustle up a bocadillo--a sandwich on a tiny french-bread style loaf -- that worked really well, and I had convinced myself that breakfast coffee is truly optional.



This walking is quite an experience. There is solitude, and there is camaraderie. There are chances to speak Spanish, even chances to interpret for people, and there are conversations with no Spanish at all-- English, spoken in various degrees by people of many nationalities, French (which I still have not recovered but now understand somewhat), German (totally unknown to me). We sit at table or meet on the road and find out what we can say to one another. It is often very good.