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Every Step Together On the Camino De Santiago
Ken Privratsky, Kathy Privratsky
Verlag BookBaby, 2021
ISBN 9781098354930 , 330 Seiten
Format ePUB
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Preparations
Preparing to walk the Camino requires much thought. We recommend that anyone who catches the bug to walk one of the routes begin reading other people’s experiences. There is an abundance of books, both in print and digital format, about the Camino written by people from multiple countries. Most of those focus on the Camino Francés. Some are guidebooks with maps and detailed descriptions of the route with recommendations for accommodations. Others provide advice about equipment and personal care. At least one details the history of the Camino over the centuries. Collectively, they provide a good sense of the Camino, but none can prepare someone to walk 500 miles with a backpack. It takes personal focus and commitment to get ready. Those who prepare stand a far better chance of dealing with the stress of walking day after day and the surprises those days can bring.
Arguably the most important part of preparing for such a long walk is determining what equipment and clothes to carry. Although many people bike the Camino and supposedly some ride horses, we chose to walk. That is by far the most common approach. Walking the Camino is the only experience we have. Walkers do not have to deal with flat tires and feeding animals. They only have to focus on keeping themselves fit and healthy day after day. Toward that end, the two most important pieces of equipment future pilgrims should focus on initially are their backpack and shoes. Many books stress people should not walk the Camino with more than ten percent of their bodyweight on their backs, excluding water and food, but less weight cannot make an ill-fitting backpack feel good. Getting oneself a properly fitted pack should be of paramount importance early on. There is a wide range of good-name packs available. We settled on ours relatively early in the planning with Kathy choosing an Osprey Sirrus 36 Liter and I an Osprey Atmos 50 Liter. Packs are personal matters, though, and before choosing, one should try on several with weight inside. You might walk with one for a month and discover it does not feel as good as in the store. It is best to locate a replacement sooner rather than later, because despite there being equipment shops for pilgrims along Camino routes, those shops are concentrated in cities of large populations and choices of equipment become limited. The key for any pack is whether it rests properly on one’s hips since that is where the bulk of weight should transfer, not higher up on backs and shoulders. A pilgrim can carry much more than ten percent of body weight in a properly fitted pack. We dutifully watched the weight of our loads when we prepared for the Camino and started walking. Days after starting the Camino, weight no longer concerned us because our packs were serving us well. We loved them. We met countless others later who complained about their packs and looked for replacements. Our first recommendation therefore is to concentrate on getting a pack that fits early, fill it up to the weight you desire, and walk with it a lot, including on hills.
An equally important choice of equipment is hiking shoes. Pilgrims walk the Camino in running shoes, sandals, high-topped leather hiking boots, and all footwear in between. We saw one person starting the last stretch from Sarria to Santiago in plain Oxford leather street shoes! If one is planning seriously to walk the Camino end to end, it is important to choose the style and type of shoes best for them. Age makes a considerable difference for shoe selection. We saw lots of young folks walking in running shoes. We did not notice any older people walking in them or in shoes without good tread and support. The most common injuries on the Camino are foot injuries like twisted ankles and blisters. We settled on Obōz brand boots relatively early in our preparation. They just happened to fit both of us well. We debated for quite some time whether to get waterproof versions. Ultimately, we both decided to go for non-waterproof Sawtooth low-hikers. The rationale for non-waterproof was that they are cooler on the feet and dry out quicker once they get soaked. We found this to be true. I wore down one pair in our preparation walks in Alaska. We both left for the Camino with hiking shoes we had worn for miles and with lots of good tread remaining. By the end of our Camino, about 600 miles in total, the tread was short on both our pairs but our feet were in good shape and, miraculously, we remained blister free. Shoes not only need to fit; they should be well broken in before one leaves home. Poor shoes will produce consequences very early. Few pilgrims complete the Camino without blister issues. We felt very fortunate not having any. Whenever we sensed a hot spot developing, we changed socks and, later in our walk, added brown tape to those areas of our feet.
It is common to overestimate the number of clothes one needs on the Camino. We include a list at the end of this book of exactly what we took. We opted to pack everything in lightweight travel packing bags and then inside waterproof bags simply for the ease of organization. This might have been overkill, but it made packing and unpacking easy. Not a day goes by when pilgrims are not unloading backpacks to access clothes and sleeping gear. Having items organized into separate packing bags makes that process much easier. We never regretted the ounce or so of additional weight from these bags.
Not surprisingly, it took us months to figure out most other things to bring, from clothes to ponchos and sleeping bags. The only higher end items we chose were ultra-light down sleeping bags and silk sleep sacks, both of which we wanted because we knew the weather would turn when we were on the trail and accommodations often would be chilly. Shirts, pants, and other items were based more on weight, ease of washing and breathability. All our clothes were inexpensive and mostly purchased on sale. In the end we found there was not much to play with if we wanted to stay close to the recommended weights.
Like our packs and shoes, we had worn all our clothes many times before we left for the Camino. Socks, shirts, shorts, pants, belts, and more had passed the test of frequent walks in Alaska. We determined where we were going to keep our passports, money and pilgrim credentials. Our clothes needed to accommodate those needs as well. One thing we perhaps did differently than some was we purposely planned to discard the clothes we had been traveling in before we departed Saint Jean Pied de Port on day one. Perhaps that will sound unusual. The benefit of this was we started our Camino with everything fresh, packed, and ready to go. We could travel in something completely different than clothes we would wear on the walk. We fully anticipated discarding most of our clothes after finishing the Camino since we expected to be sick of them by then. And that is exactly what we did. Few people return from the Camino thinking they have too few clothes at home! We had no problem finding some presentable and expendable clothes in our closets.
There are a whole lot of things to add to a backpack. Some of these items might not be allowable on commercial aircraft. Each pilgrim has to assess whether to take everything when they leave or purchase some items once overseas. There is no right solution. Another key factor is whether a backpack is small enough to be carried aboard a plane. If it is, then that restricts taking some things like extra liquids, a knife, scissors, and maybe even walking sticks. In such a case, it is best to purchase some items overseas. My Osprey Atmos 50 was too big for carry-on luggage, and we had planned on checking it in a disposable cargo bag all along. We were a little anxious about checking in our luggage, but we had no choice, and it enabled us to add other items not allowed on aircraft.
Weighing the clothes and other items we had settled on left us gasping for breath! As we began selecting clothes and equipment, we thought we would end up well within the ten-percent-of-body-weight recommendations. It just did not happen. We heeded the advice of many books and purchased small sizes of toiletries and creams, knowing in most places and certainly in larger cities we would be able to find replacements. What we discovered later, however, is that despite replacements being abundantly available, travel sizes were not. And so, on our Camino walk when we purchased those replacements, we found ourselves packing the same number of ounces as the bigger sizes we had left behind! By the time we were ready to start our pilgrimage, we were still a bit over the recommended weights. But by then we had learned it was not so much the weights of our packs as the packs themselves that meant the most.
A key consideration nowadays is what to do about electronics. At least one guidebook urges pilgrims to leave them behind and focus only on the Camino, which seems to us to be a little naïve. Most pilgrims will not have the luxury of divorcing themselves from families and responsibilities when walking week after week. We certainly did not. We wanted to be able to be contacted immediately if there were problems. We also wanted to communicate with others about our experiences. We eventually set up a Facebook page in order to share information and photographs. We relied on our iPhones for posting updates and photographs and for much more. Even though I carried a guidebook in my pocket for quick access to maps, our primary references became other guidebooks and references downloaded on our iPhones. Those phones enabled us to pare down weight while maintaining our ability to...
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