I am very likely to be resuming my current (lengthy) (and lengthily delayed) foot pilgrimage to Fátima, Santiago de Compostela, Lourdes, then home next week, from Lleida in Catalonia.
It will likely be very hard at the start, i.e. for a few weeks, but then isn’t all life ?
JabbaPapa's Catholic Blog 
Leaving tomorrow.
Good jolly old negative PCR whotsit …
Getting there, slowly, painfully, but not continuing before next year now —
9 weeks this year, and about 800K. 2,000K total so far or thereabouts, so well ; not even halfway yet.
Meseta 2021 :
Julian – i have found you. At last I can apologise.
Please email me if you feel like it
It would be good to hear from you
Jack Cronin, Paris, 1995 (?)
Oh, hallo Jack !! Nice to hear from you …
Not sure what you mean to apologise for, as I can think of literally nothing that you might have done wrong.
I’m editing your e-mail out of your post for spam avoidance purposes.
There is nothing wrong with a slow camino, especially in these covid days. Nor with doing your camino in multiple sections. Obviously, your original “true pilgrim” wouldn’t have had the luxury of being able to take a bus home and restart ad libitum, and would have either had to carry on or give up. But these days we can und das is gut.
Many pilgrims even in Mediaeval times would choose faster travel means home than the Way there, and typically only the poorest among them would need and choose to walk there and back.
Or the more devout.
But public transport was invented in the 15th Century !!
The very FIRST question people almost always ask, who are unfamiliar with the Way of Saint James, is “where do you sleep ?” — and I do not except myself. In late ’92 or more probably early ’93, when I was contemplating my first Camino, well ; except a photo finish with footwear, it was clearly my main concern. But in the face of that, my bizarre childhood and adolescence had already made me more independent-minded than most ; I had a great trust in the intuition and cognition of the friend who hooked me onto it in the first place ; I loved Spain and so was very amenable to spending some weeks in that wonderful country ; I was clearly in need of some sort of transformative or at least progressive experience for several reasons (though I certainly was not expecting a conversion to Christianity !!) ; but my main reassurance against this accommodation worry was that it couldn’t be as bad as homelessness. And that was survivable.
Of course, my worry about how bad can this Camino thing be ? … turned quickly into, how amazing is the Camino !!
We have an animal ability to find good places to sleep, minimalist or best as circumstance provides.
As to that, I will never forget the stark contrast between two successive nights in the Languedoc, on the French Catalan Way in 2019.
First, in the dust of an abandoned chicken coop, hungry and tired, after having been denied a stay in the albergue ; next night, the extreme comfort of a three star hotel room kindly offered by a good Christian priest.
But bottom line ? I was happy for finding the sleeping arrangements both evenings, and slept as well in the first as the second, albeit that some creature comforts lacked in the first.
So really — where you will sleep is far less important than how you will hike along the Way — and WHY and what and who you might find as you trudge along these ancient Pilgrim Ways.
When walking the Francès after having started from further away, I’d say the three hardest days physically are (in geographical order) SJPP > Roncesvalles ; Carrión de los Condes > Calzadilla de la Cueza etc ; the O Cebreiro stage, regardless of where you start and finish that day.
The first and last days have their own strangeness ; though I’d say that if you’re starting from home, there’s a peculiar day during week 1 when you cross over the borderland between “close to home” and “far from home” that has its own difficulty.
Each longer Camino has its peculiars of course — the most difficult part of starting from where I live now is getting through or around Nice, as it has an absolutely massive urban & suburban area, so that walking through it is 2 to 3 days of urban hiking, whereas walking around the city is 3 to 4 days of some not so easy mountain hiking with some suburbia for extra measure. On my Paris Camino in 1994, I’d say the most difficult part of that was week 2, though week 3 had its own difficulties ; but on the Chartres variant, the first day after Chartres was difficult on its own. Day 1 was easy, as half of it was on the basic training route that I’d been using for months. A great priest gave me an amazing late lunch, as the lady who had cooked their lunch had prepared far too much of it, so I got a full plate and a glass of wine just as they had been finishing theirs, which was incredibly encouraging. The other priest who gave me a bed that night was rather dubious, and even somewhat shocked as I was the first Compostelan foot pilgrim he’d ever seen, even though the place he was running was a hostel for religious retreats and was full of beds.
As to day 1 from here, for me it’s always just the local short & easy pilgrimage route from home to the Sanctuary at Laghet ; and regardless that it’s also the crossing from this side of the Alps (Italian) to the other (French), physically it’s almost as easy as crossing over the Pyrenees from Cerbère to Portbou, and shorter than crossing them at the very easily hiked Perthus pass. Uphill, it’s about as steep here as the first stretch out of SJPP and as the climb up to the Somport, but it’s much shorter than both. IIRC, first time I did it, I simply trotted off out the front door after my lunch and after a final work shift on my computer, at about 2-3 PM. Not at all the same thing as a Day 1 starting from some faraway location in a foreign land !!