Day 24 – Bearing Down on El Burgo

We leave Saragun and go west to El Burgo Ranero.

A final goodbye to the huge gate of Saragun

as we begin another flat, warmish walk.

Neat little bridge over Rio Ces.

Sleepy pilgrim Mike, lazing around a bit.

Dave, screaming up the trail to Calzada del Coto.

A brief interview with pilgrim Dave.

It was fun running into Atari Jane, to whom I

gave Motrin a couple of weeks ago in Granon.

Here is the bag that earned her

the title of Atari Jane!

Stopped for orange Fanta with Jane and Sarah,

her daughter. The tat says "To the end, to the truth." 

Randi, Sarah and Jane join us for a break

in Bercianos del Real Camino.

Mike spots our destination through the 

sycamore trees and clicks his heels. 

(Didn't worry about him bumping his head

on a tree limb with only an inch vertical.)

We make it to El Burgo Ranero at last!

Got set up at the hotel and grabbed a drink at the bar.

Hope you don't think all we do is walk and drink.

(We do ice cream, also!)

 The Church of the Stork aubergue (hostel).

Sorry for a relatively short post, but the internet
in our hotel tonight is awful, and this is all we could
manage. Mansilla de las Mulas is our next stop!

Two stories from Dave:

Just as we were getting ready to take a picture of Jane and Sarah (below), our friend Randi from Denmark appeared. We asked her to join the picture. Randi is the one in orange; do you remember her? She's the woman who had a Danish book explaining the 7 Keys to the Soul of a Pilgrim. Anyway, Randi took us over to a group of German women she'd been walking with and said, "These are the men who have been carrying those rocks I told you about." She then pulled out a rock from her pocket (one she had picked up after meeting us), and it had the name of her grandson written on it! How proudly she showed it to us. Guess we were supposed to meet Randi again, and I'm glad we did. It felt good to think that she had joined us in our efforts to bless and remember our families.

Catching up with old friends.

As I mentioned earlier, we spotted that Atari backpack in front of us again just outside of Bercianos del Real Camino and ended up sitting down with Jane and her daughter, Sarah, for a midday break. Remember them? Jane from Wales had an injured foot and was limping badly when Mike (our amateur drug pusher) gave her a Motrin 8. Her daughter gave me a sports drink powder. We hadn't seen them since that time about two weeks ago, and having taken two rest days since then, we figured we wouldn't be seeing any old friends from here on out. But that's not how the Camino works, because it brought us together again. We were chatting a while before we finally asked why they were walking the Camino. They said that their husband/dad had taken his own life two years ago, and they were walking and raising money for a suicide prevention group in their local area. We paused for a moment in surprise and solidarity before explaining our cause. It was an intimate moment as we all looked at one another without speaking. Jane finally voiced what each one of us was thinking: "We were meant to see each other again." No doubt about it. We exchanged contact information; and after we said our goodbyes for possibly the last time, Mike and I agreed to make a contribution to their important cause. Whom will we be guided to next?

More wise words from a fellow walker, Nipun Mehta:

Most of us believe that to give, we first need to have something to give. The trouble with that is, that when we are taking stock of what we have, we almost always make accounting errors. Oscar Wilde once quipped, "Now-a-days, people know the price of everything, but the value of nothing." We have forgotten how to value things without a price tag. Hence, when we get to our most abundant gifts––like attention, insight, compassion––we confuse their worth because they're well, priceless...On our walking pilgrimage, we noticed that those who had the least were most readily equipped to honor the priceless...True generosity doesn't start when you have some thing to give, but rather when there's nothing in you that's trying to take. 

As Dave and Mike said in an earlier post, giving seems to come naturally on the Camino. Perhaps that's why The Way becomes a spiritual experience for so many. When pilgrims give themselves over to the walk, somehow the window of giving opens as wide and far as the pilgrimage they are making. It is said that, once you've walked the Camino, you're always a pilgrim. Dave and Mike hope that is true!

Click below to support suicide prevention

and mental health, the causes Mike and Dave 

are championing with their walk.