O Cadavo to Lugo – 100kms to go!

The weather has taken a turn since last week’s sunset musings.  The temperature has fallen and so has the rain, but that doesn’t matter when you are travelling virtually and most of your steps are indoors.  I am also back at my virtual office, spending my days on Zoom calls, sending emails and drafting documents from the coffee table in my living room.  During my week off we made good progress on what will become our dining room and I am very much looking forward to having a proper table to work from, probably just in time to go back to the office for real!

I have accumulated a little over 30kms since I last wrote, 209.14kms in total.  This brings me to the town of Lugo, 100kms away from Santiago and two thirds of the way through our journey.  At my average rate of travel it will be four more weeks before my pilgrimage is over.

I have been feeling a little disconnected to the route, clocking up distance just by living and almost arbitrarily assigning it to stages of the Camino Primitivo.  Following the success of watching YouTube videos of ‘real’ walkers, I decided to look and see what other inspiration I could find and came across a film called ‘The Way’ on Amazon Prime.  Written and produced by Emilio Estevez, and staring his father Martin Sheen, the film follows a group of pilgrims who are walking the popular Camino Frances which starts just over the border in the French Pyrenees (hence the name) and at almost 800km is much longer than the Camino Primitivo.  I won’t give anything away about the plot, in case you would like to watch it for yourself, but I must admit that I enjoyed seeing the landscape of northern Spain and the interiors of some of the Albergues (pilgrim hostels) more than the story.  The plot itself is full of potential but for me the execution left a bit to be desired and some of the characters were poorly executed.  Despite a claim not to carry any particular ideologies or messages, there were elements of the main female pilgrim’s back story and the conclusions that you were invited to draw about the reason for her journey, which personally made me uncomfortable in the way they were represented.  That being said, overall the ‘The Way’ was an interesting, and at times funny, watch and it was perhaps naive of me to be surprised to find conservative Catholic undertones in a film about pilgrimage.