![]() ![]() But after my experience getting lost in La Pedriza my heart wasn’t really into it. He’d done the Camino himself – the French route – a few summers before, and he described it as a sort of large, ambulatory college party, complete with its own hook-up scene. “You won’t see a single tree all the way across Castilla.” I was living with some semi-hippies at the time and I told one of them about my “plan” to walk the Camino from Madrid. So it turned out that Europe did have some actual nature. I eventually made it back to civilization, too late for the last bus, and spent the night in the local park, trying to sleep in my t-shirt in the cold. ![]() Oh, to relive that state of youthful self-confidence for a day! Without killing myself, hopefully.Īs it turned out, I was wrong about all of the above, and what followed was a long afternoon and evening being lost and alone in La Pedriza – a particularly rocky natural park with almost no human habitation. That Europe was covered end to end in cafés, bus stops and train stations, so if I got lost, I’d just find the nearest bit of infrastructure and be home in an hour.That I understood enough Spanish to follow the instructions in the guidebook.That the trail would be well-marked, and further….I think I was working on my novel at that point (long story) so I left home around lunch time, figuring I’d still have all afternoon to walk. How to get lost on the Camino de Santiagoįor one, I started later in the day. So setting out on the bus, I walked out of Manzanares el Real around 3 PM thinking I was in for an easy-to-medium-level hike in the hills. This was off the map, as far as I recall, but by this time I had a Camino de Santiago guidebook that specifically covered the way from Madrid. Then one day late that same summer I decided it was time to go from Manzanares to Cercedilla. Over the following weeks, armed with the same map, I did a couple more sections, taking the bus or train to start: Tres Cantos to Colmenar Viejo and Colmenar Viejo to Manzanares el Real. The cathedral in Santiago de Compostela in 1998, by Matthias Bethke, CC SA 4.0 This was a rather hot and sweaty endeavour of 25 kilometers, which took me most of the day, but I made it, and had proof of concept. And due to the dismal salaries involved in TEFL teaching, I was always looking for things to do that were as cheap as “taking a long walk” or – if possible – even cheaper.Īnyway, paper map in hand, I walked from Embajadores up to the Iglesia de Santiago, through the center, up La Castellana to some giant intersection of freeways, through El Pardo and then along the train tracks to Tres Cantos. This, of course, was back when I was an English teacher, so I was unemployed from July to September every year. I tested the feasibility of the plan with a paper map and a bottle of water in my backpack, one hot unemployed summer day. I lived in Madrid at the time, near Glorieta de Embajadores, so this sounded like fun. Not only did I want to do the Camino, but I’d also heard that the old-school way of doing it was to leave from your house, and walk from wherever you were all the way to Santiago de Compostela. ![]() When I was in my 20s, I wanted to do the Camino de Santiago. ![]()
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