Buen camino, peregrino!

If you think that Camino is calling you, you can find out my experience during the 21 days of walking, on the French route, the oldest pilgrim route in Europe. Being a special year, post Covid-19, with uncertain situations, closed borders, applied security measures, deserted roads, municipal, parish and even private albergue (some, of course) closed, planes left on the ground and thus cancelled flights and many cancellations of plans, I realized together with my husband that it is necessary to mobilize and that's how we covered the approximately 840 km from Pamplona to Santiago de Compostela. You may be wondering, how did we do this in just 21 days, because you usually need a longer period of time to cover this route, about 35-40 days actually, well, pure audacity, lack of open accommodation, where we could spend the night, but also driven by the desire to reach the destination without problems. Of course, various problems and fears arose during this adventure, among which we were stopped by the police and the fear of not being able to return (due to the government desire to close Romania's borders) and others I will tell you in the coming days of Camino.

Turistic indicator

Of course you may not know, but I am a person with disabilities, paraplegia after a spinal cord injury (or in less medical terms lack of feet mobility), which often led to the need of help from my husband in most stages of the route, even if I had a hand bike attached to the wheelchair (cool, huh?).

So coming back to this year's main problem, Covid-19, planes don't fly, what do we do? That was in our minds, since the end of March, when our first flight was cancelled. That shouldn’t have been a problem, but they were cancelled again two times, desperation took over and we said stop and made the impulsive decision to take our bus tickets. Nice, isn't it? 36 hours spent in a bus without many possibilities to get off, accessibility? naaaaah. We chose the Baia Mare-Zaragoza route, as we are from Maramureș and have long wanted to bathe our eyes in the beauty of the Virgen del Pilar cathedral. It was strange that before entering the cathedral, we accidentally entered a church dedicated to St. James (as well as the cathedral of Santiago), it seemed to me a magical coincidence, which wonderfully makes our story take a cyclical touch. From here on again on the bus to Pamplona (we were just talking about cycles), because Saint-Jean du Port, the usual place to start the pilgrimage was closed. I cannot express myself clearly, describe in words what I felt when I received the first stamp on the credencial (pilgrim's passport) in Pamplona Cathedral.