I had purposefully carried the pictured stone over 400 miles in my shoulder bag (all the way from SW Germany) in order to one day place it reverently in the Le Puy cathedral, and it felt immensely satisfying on this particular day to finally be able to do so — to finally be able to […]
For those who will never make it to Le Puy, much less walk the Camino through southern France, this is how it looks for every pilgrim setting forth from that phenomenal place. After each morning’s pilgrims mass is concluded and the pilgrims present have been blessed, a metal grate in the very middle of the […]
I made it thereafter to the local tourist information center, told them of my quest, and was given the address of Le Puy’s donativo pilgrims hostel — along with a set of “It’s quite easy to find” directions thereto. Of course, as one can well imagine, navigating Le Puy’s medievally winding and often completely unlabeled […]
The hostel in Le Puy wasn’t open until later that afternoon, so I returned to the tourist information office to see if they had any information on hand related to what might lay in store for me along the upcoming legs of the Camino. I hadn’t really collected any facts or tidbits about The Way […]
After Hartmut had departed to set up camp for the night (in the tent he was carrying with him on his bicycle) and after I had finished mining a smattering of Camino information from the pamphlets in the local tourist bureau, I headed back to the still-closed hostel to write in its courtyard for awhile. […]
As a general rule, I spent as little time as possible in larger cities during my Walk — primarily due to the fact that the far greater sense of hustle-&-bustle therein (along with the far greater prevalence of those well-known, hyper-selfish siblings: material wealth & greed) tempted most of their residents to glance quickly and […]
“It is crucial to realize that there are no wrong turnings in life; only paths taken we had not yet known we were to walk — only consequences we had not yet known we were to accrue — and only lessons we had not yet known we were to thereby learn.” ~ inspired by Guy […]
While the natural tempo with which I walked steadily rose the closer I got to Santiago (and thus the longer I was allowing my hips and legs to heal from the trauma they had endured during the Walk’s initial stages), there remained quite regularly pilgrims who would blow past me as though I were standing […]
“One of the greatest charms of pilgrim-life is its complete lack of monotony. In truth, for the true pilgrim the face of life is ever protean — a continuously shifting phantasmagoria of wonderment; where the seemingly impossible often occurs without discord, and the wholly unexpected jumps out of the bushes at almost every turn of […]
Thereafter I was able to walk without much difficulty under cool-while-mostly-sunny skies (graced as they were with a regular smattering of blessed cloud-cover), all the way to the lovely little town of St. Christoph sur Dolaizon with its peace-full little church and its friendly little town hall — the latter of which being the place […]
I found the landscape after Le Puy to steadily become more lush & wondrous, and yet by far the most noticeable shift that occurred at this point of my Walk was the presence of so many more pilgrims on The Road. Whereas, before Le Puy I only encountered a sporadic sprinkling of fellow travelers during […]
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