Our Walk Along the Camino de Madrid

Lessons and Advice for the Camino de Madrid “My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. … But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.”    Thomas Merton  From the city to the sierras, through forests, fields, and faith.  There was so much to the Camino de Madrid.  I suppose it is simplest to state at the outset that, above all, the Camino de Madrid surprised us!     It is one of the quietest, least-travelled pilgrimage routes in Spain, but it offered some of the richest moments of solitude, wilderness, kindness, and personal reflection we’ve experienced on any of the Caminos. Starting at the heart of Spain’s capital city and ending in the fields of Sahagún, this Camino took us through a full spectrum of landscapes and emotions.  A Walk Between Worlds There’s something symbolic about walking out of a bustling metropolis and into stillness. Fro...

“The question is not what you look at, but what you see.” Henry David Thoreau, Journal , August 5, 1851   Returning to the Camino with Different Eyes   When we stepped onto the Camino de Madrid in the spring of 2022, we returned to Spain as very different walkers from those who had first set out from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port six years earlier. During the intervening years, long-distance walking had moved from something we occasionally undertook while travelling to becoming an enormous part of our lives. Most significantly, we had spent the previous three years making our way west across Canada on the Trans Canada Trail, walking from Cape Spear on Newfoundland’s Atlantic coastline through the Maritimes, Quebec, Ontario and the Prairies to the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains. Through #Hike4Birds, watching, listening for, photographing and recording birds had become intertwined with those years on foot.   Our return to the Camino came during an opportunity one spring ...