Cardañuela-Riopico to Burgos – 8 kilometers
I woke in the albergue to the most restful sleep I’ve had in two weeks. Perhaps it’s the lightness that comes with a difficult decision finally made – the relief of accepting what needs to be, rather than clinging to what I had hoped. For days I had wrestled with the choice between continuing the pilgrimage or returning home, and now there’s peace in knowing my path.
A Precious Connection
The morning brought something that had been nearly impossible these past two weeks – a real conversation with my husband Ken. He’s away in Amsterdam, clearing unexploded ordnance from the Second World War, working night shifts that have made our communication windows impossibly narrow. When I wake to begin my walking day, he’s exhausted from his demanding work. When evening comes and I find myself in crowded albergues with sleeping pilgrims, he’s just beginning his shift.
But this morning, we had thirty minutes together across the digital divide. Just talking, just being present with each other despite the distance. It’s exactly what we both needed.
From Green Hills to Gray Sprawl
I began walking from the village hidden in green hills, carrying the warmth of that conversation with me. The morning felt peaceful, contemplative – this is the Camino rhythm I’ve come to know and love.
But after only a couple of kilometers, the shift became tangible. The industrial sprawl started creeping in – busy roadsides, trucks thundering past, the urban landscape crawling over the countryside like a gray tide. I found myself walking through areas so ugly, so depressing, that I nearly regretted seeing them.
The contrast grew starker with each step. I remembered it differently from my 2019 pilgrimage. Today everything felt harder, more industrial, more divorced from the human scale of pilgrimage. The trucks seemed louder, the landscape more scarred.
I barely noticed entering Burgos itself – suddenly I was just there, having walked eight kilometers through a transition that felt like being gradually swallowed by the modern world’s relentless noise and movement. The peaceful village in green hills felt like it belonged to another lifetime, not just this morning.
Seven Hours of Reckoning
By 9 o’clock, I was in Burgos with a long day of waiting ahead of me. First, an hour in a restaurant, just eating breakfast slowly to fill time. Then an hour on a bench outside a church. Then couple of hours in McDonald’s seeking warmth. Finally, more hours in the train station.
Seven hours of transition. Seven hours that forced me to confront something I’ve been discovering throughout this pilgrimage: my relationship with time itself.
For two weeks, I’ve been walking, reflecting, being present with each step and each breath. Time has had a different quality – not something to be killed, but something to be inhabited. Now suddenly I’m back in a world of screens and noise, where time becomes something to fill rather than savor.
The shock was profound. The contemplative rhythm of the Camino doesn’t prepare you for the jarring return to distraction culture. My mind races, unable to settle into the stillness that walking had taught me.
Questions Rising
In the late afternoon, trying to quiet the internal storm, questions rise up unbidden: What am I doing with my life? How do I want to spend the time I have left? How much of my existence do I spend wishing I was somewhere else, doing something else, being someone else?
I remember in 2019, my life’s motto was to “live every day as if it was the last.” It was impossible. The intensity was unsustainable, the pressure enormous. But here on the Camino, something different has been happening. Not the frantic urgency of treating each day as potentially final, but a profound hunger to truly inhabit my time rather than kill it.
The Camino has a way of stripping away the noise that usually drowns out these essential questions. Walking day after day creates space for what matters to surface. And what I’m discovering is a faith-driven awareness that each moment is a gift to be received, not a problem to be solved or time to be killed.
The Train Platform Metaphor
When the delayed train finally arrived, I was surprised by the security measures – we couldn’t even enter the platform until the train arrived, then we went through X-ray screening, removing jackets and bags. I’ve traveled by train across different countries and never seen anything like it. But here we were, complying without question, as if this too was just part of the necessary friction of modern life.
It feels like a metaphor for how we’ve learned to accept invasion and inconvenience as normal, how we’ve built systems that treat human movement as inherently suspicious.
Neither Last Nor Least
This may be my last day of walking this stretch of the Camino, but it’s not the last day of my pilgrimage. The real Camino begins when you carry its rhythm into the rest of your life. It’s in how you maintain the clarity about what matters when you’re back in the noise and demands of ordinary time.
Today taught me that the transition itself is part of the journey. The jarring contrast between contemplative walking and urban chaos, the challenge of finding connection across distance, the questions that rise when we stop moving fast enough to outrun them – all of this is the Camino teaching us something about how we want to live.
The path continues, even when the official route pauses. Today was neither last nor least – it was exactly what it needed to be: another step toward understanding what it means to live with presence, purpose, and faith.
Buen Camino – may our path continue long after our walking ends.
