I’ll begin this blog by mentioning the main topic that I have thought about a lot since the last one I wrote, which was my journey to and on the Camino and all of the things we did during it and the people we interacted with on it. I hope to also mention some of the cool things that happened to me, which made my experience really good, challenging and made me in the end not want to leave.
The first thing I’ll say is that as you read in the last blog I wrote, my team “Chimichanga” had a few months where we all just were supposed to truly trust God with everything like with all of the financial things we had, the lodging places and even the long distance transportation that we had because it just happened to be the way that our team was living in Europe while we were there. It also made me feel like it was a time where my team and I had to fully rely on God to provide for us and I think He truly did that for the team for sure in amazing way like how He just was providing housing opportunities when we couldn’t find any options or just really allowing us to create long lasting friendships everywhere we went. If I have to be completely honest, I truly have to say that I feel like those two months were probably my favorite two months of the Race so far.
I also want to take you back to the time when we were in Turin, Italy visiting my teammate, Ana’s friend whose name is Fernanda. It was a time when we literally had to trust that God would provide for us and after a lot of prayer, He allowed us to connect with her and she said to us, “Yes you can stay with me and I can work around your budget and make it work”, which is something only God could truly do. While we were there we felt like our team was supposed to really encourage Fernanda to just receive joy and just feel like we are her friends because she told us that she was feeling pretty lonely and was very excited for our visit. I also felt like we could potentially meet new people there and I was excited for that too. I also thought that it would be a time of growth in showing love to her and I was happy for the opportunity to show that to her as well.
Then after we arrived something wild happened, which was when my team and I were hanging out together in Fernanda’s apartment and then randomly out of nowhere the landlord of her place comes into the apartment and inspects the whole place to see if it was being clean during our stay there. We then hear from Fernanda that he told her that we must leave the apartment the next morning because he supposedly saw some issues with the attic, which was outside the of it and we still don’t know what he was even talking about. However, we all felt good about continuing our amazing journey into our next destination, which was going to be in Pamplona, Spain where we would begin walking the Camino and at first I was unsure about doing it due to hearing about the distance and thought of pain I could have. After we stayed with her, we all were glad to be with her and we knew that it was a successful and fun trip.
After that experience, my whole team then realized that we all had to book the bus to Pamplona really quickly because of us having to leave the next day and we kind of got a little tension due to it being already pretty late for us. However, we all prayed for it and after hours of figuring it out and finding it out the best options on the internet for the bus, we got told to wait at a random bus stop in an area where people were saying things like, “I truly don’t think that a bus travels to anywhere but the airport.” We were also told things like “the buses that you’re using usually are an hour late to pick people up and that when we arrived to the bus stop the next morning we would have to buy the tickets from the bus driver because it wasn’t one of the main bus companies we have used before, which was weird to me.
Then the next day came and while we were sitting on the ground waiting for the bus to arrived, I felt like I was to the point in thinking that, “I truly don’t feel like this bus will come today and I think we should leave because this bus is taking forever, maybe we are just supposed to stay here for another night.” However, it eventually came to the random bus stop we were at and that is when we began our journey to the Camino in Pamplona.
On the way there, it truly felt like we literally made a stop for a food and a bathroom break at different places every hour and it felt like we were on a 20+ hours bus ride, which made me very bored and tired. In fact, for our lunch time meal at McDonalds, the bus drivers actually dropped us off somewhere in France to eat it for 30 minutes because he decided to go do something during that time and then had to came back and pick us up. After that was happening to us, I prayed that we would make it to Pamplona relatively on time and it certainly was an experience I’ll never forget in the end.
Then when my team and I finally arrived to Pamplona we didn’t even have a place booked to sleep for that night, but since we were walking on the Camino the next day, we ended up staying in an albergue (hostel), which was really awesome. We also were really excited and I met a guy from Poland who was cool and I was very happy to be joining the thousands of pilgrims and each other for the 10 days were going to be traveling it to Burgos. However, I also knew that it would be challenging and I was unsure if I was ready for that as well.
Then the next day my team started the Camino and as we started walking a path, we heard a guy behind us say, “Hey are you all Americans because you all sound like you have an accent to be one.” We said to him “yes” and then told him our names and the states that we were from and he then told us that he was a guy named Mike from Dallas, Texas and it was at that moment that we all knew our connection with him would continue to grow because he was really cool and fun to be around and hopefully overtime he would want to actually be apart of our team. In fact, ever since we met him that day we actually got the opportunity to walk the whole Camino section that we were doing with him, which was really awesome because he watched the movie about the Camino De Santiago and he also had an application that showed him the different destinations where he stop at throughout the whole Camino journey, which was really helpful for all of us because we didn’t really know about it and I specifically didn’t prepare for it.
It was also cool that when we first met Mike, he wasn’t a guy who really was wanting to even pray with us for daily hiking, but as we were ending our time he actually decided to pray for all of us and also when some of the others weren’t in the same room for us to pray, he asked them to come join us, which is amazing. We also loved being there with Mike because he was really funny and just made our experience on the Camino journey really fun and exciting.
We also met two girls, whose name were Monte and the other one was named Sarah and they also were on the hiking trail with my team and Mike. They were both also solo traveling like Mike was from different locations around the world, Sarah was from Scotland and Monte lives in New Mexico. During the time on the Camino, they both told us that they truly wanted to go figure out what they are going to do next with their lives after it and they also wanted to walk the full distance to Santiago. As we were walking together as a group, we realized that they really liked traveling with us and we liked traveling with them too. In fact, when we all got to our final destination in Burgos, Spain we took a day to relax and spend some more time with them,which was awesome and they are now some of my friends.
We also had three birthday celebrations while on the Camino which were, my teammates Emily and Kaelyn’s and also another German girl I met on the Camino named Lisa and it was truly an amazing experience as well.
For Emily’s birthday, we had a day when Mike and a few other people that were with us cooked meals for us that night and then we had our “family dinner” together and ate some cake together, which was a lot of fun. I also thought that it was cool to truly get to know them in a way that created unity and I’m glad that we got to make some awesome memories together and it certainly won’t be any I’ll ever forget.
For Kaelyn’s birthday, we also had some desert in a small town area, which is where we ate some pizza that night together because it was a place that didn’t have a lot of options for food and we then did something that was different, which was when we went to the a place Ana said was the “top of the mountain”, but it really was really a small hill that we climbed and we decided to have some time for worship. We also celebrated Lisa’s birthday with cake as well and it was cool just having her experience us do that for her as well. All of those things really made the Camino great.
There also was a time where we traveled to another place that had a pool and for dinner we cooked a meal together and Mike tested us pretty much on our faith by asking us some tough questions that were pretty hard to answer. However, my teammate Josh decided to answer some of them and I truly feel like he answered them in a great way completely led by the Holy Spirit because it seemed that Mike took them well. I also think that it was really cool to see our team help him see us as a group in unity and love and I feel like it helped us in the way we walk with the Lord and I’m proud of my team being able to show them the same love that Jesus loves us with.
When were ending our time on the Camino, we all were a little bit sad because we knew that we had to leave each other and we didn’t want to stop our journey on it. However, we did remind each other that it will not be a good bye forever, but instead it will be a see you again sometime down the road and that I look forward to the next time we see each other. I also got their social media accounts and told them that they could message me anytime to chat if they needed to and video chat me as well. What’s even cooler is that they are now apart of my WhatsApp group “Chimichanga”, so they now get to be apart of our big amazing “family”.
As you can see, the Camino was a lot of fun with growing in some new amazing amazing ways with all of the awesome connections like the ones with Mike, Monte, and Sarah and the other people too. I love how it really allowed us to be a close “family” who truly cares for one another and I’m excited to see spend even more time with them down the road.
I’m also glad that my team got to actually leave early from Fernanda’s place because if we wouldn’t have, we would have never had this experience with all of them and my Camino experience would have not been nearly as good. Here’s to hoping I have the opportunity to impact more people in South America and the rest of the world as well.
