Walking ‘The Way’ in Spain

It’s 500 miles from St. Jean Pied-de-Port in France up and over the Pyrenees Mountains to Santiago de Compostela on the north-western coast of the Galicia region in Spain. That’s a long trek for anyone to make ... especially on foot.

But that is just what Ohio County native Crystal Daugherty did over the course of 34 days. Daugherty was not alone on her walk. In fact, before the pandemic, 347,578 pilgrims as they are called, walked the Camino de Santiago in 2019 alone.

The Camino de Santiago also known as “The Way of St. James” is a network of pilgrimages leading to the shrine of the apostle St. James in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela where tradition holds the apostle is buried. The Camino has been drawing Christian pilgrims since the 10th century, but in recent times it has developed into a spiritual journey undertaken annually by thousands of Christians and non-Christians. It is considered one of the three major Christian pilgrimages along with Rome and Israel.

Daugherty, 36, who now splits time between her home in Horse Branch and Northern Kentucky where she is a professor at Northern Kentucky University, first heard about the Camino sometime between 2016-2017 when one of her co-workers said they should take a group of college students and walk the last 100 kilometers of the Camino.

“I brushed it off, but I love to travel. So, I looked it up and that snowballed into reading about it and watching a movie, ‘The Way’ with Martin Sheen and documentaries,” she said. “I just went down this rabbit hole and the next thing I knew I had

ordered a guidebook even though I still was not planning on doing anything.”

When 2018 rolled around, Daugherty said she had some time off in the summer while working on her Ph.D. and thought she would just pack her bags and head to Spain to walk the last 100 kilometers of the Camino de Santiago.

“I didn’t tell anyone,” she said. “I called my parents to take me to the airport because I had bought a ticket to Spain.”

Completing the last 100 kilometers makes a pilgrim eligible for a Pilgrim’s Certificate.

“I walked it and it was so difficult on your body. I landed and immediately started walking and I made some lifelong friends along the way and I said maybe one day I will come back. I didn’t really give it serious thought.”

When 2020 rolled around she was hired at NKU and was working remotely due to the pandemic. She hadn’t traveled anywhere in a while and was itching to travel again but couldn’t because of the coronavirus restrictions. So, she started planning trips to different places instead. A friend encouraged her to use her time off in the summers to go walk the entire Camino.

At the beginning of 2022, attempting to do the full Camino de Santiago was on her bucket list. She said she had accomplished most of her professional goals and a couple of her travel goals and was now moving on to setting new ones. By spring a coworker told her to stop talking about it and buy the ticket and go.

“So, I bought the ticket.”

She set aside 45-days to walk the Camino Francis route. The guidebook had the route broken down to finish in 33-34 days. She said she factored in some “buffer days” just in case she needed to rest or wanted more time to explore.

Prior to leaving, Daugherty knew she wasn’t going to be a fast walker. She focused more on endurance rather than speed. She would go to the gym in the mornings to walk a few miles, but the most she had walked in preparing for the journey was five to six miles a day.

“If you can’t be fast you have to build endurance. That was my focus,” she said. “I focused on training my body to walk for a long time ... And it worked. I made it.”

She departed Nashville on June 19 and landed in Barcelona the following day. After a couple of trains, taxis and bus rides, she ended up in Pamplona, Spain where she hired a taxi to take her across the Spain/France border to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port where the Camino Frances started. The Camino Frances is the most popular route of the Camino de Santiago.

While she started the journey alone, she ended it with her “Camino Family” whom she met along the way.

During the Camino, pilgrims stay in hostels, albergues or hotels depending on the size of the city they stop in for the night.

Daugherty said there are people from all over the world who are walking the Camino for many different reasons. For her, it was spiritual, and one of the things she said that you learn along the way is that you have to be open to whatever happens.

“The saying is the Camino will provide,” she said. “If your wallet is stolen, you run out of money on the Camino someone will take care of you and often that is a fellow pilgrim.”

She met most of her “Camino Family” during the first three days of her walk. On the first night she ended up meeting four of the 20 people that she ended up walking with. While some met along the way often split up at different times along the walk, those four people walked into Santiago de Compostela with her.

The Camino Frances is well established and there are markers with a scallop shell symbol along the path serving as a guide for pilgrims.

“As long as you see a sign with a seashell, you are at least in a town associated with the Camino,” she said. “If you are following the trail markers, you are on your way. Most people don’t deviate (from the guidebook and trail markers). The yellow seashell or yellow arrows are always pointing toward Santiago.”

The first two days she had to pass the Pyrenees Mountain range and deal with the high altitudes.

“Day one I wanted to quit. I think everyone has that voice in their head that says, ‘You can’t do that,’”

That first day was really defeating for her. She said she was feeling great the first two hours but then hit the base of the mountain and started the serious incline. That’s when she said it felt like she wasn’t moving. Even though she could see her feet moving, it didn’t feel like she was making progress.

“That’s when I had the thought, “You could just quit. You’ve already done more than anyone you know.’ When I had that thought my next thought was, “I would be so disappointed in myself if I quit on day one, so I kept walking.”

Daugherty said the Camino is broken down into three parts. The first 10 days are for your body, the second 10 days are for your mind and the last 10 days are for your soul.

“The first 10 days for sure body. I got that right away. My legs hurt. I wanted to quit. I had blisters. It had rained the second day so my shoes were wet. I was cold, but then I got used to it and I was fine,” she said. “That was the first big struggle that I had to overcome, the voices of doubt.”

The terrain was different depending on what area of the country she was in. It ranged from those early days in the mountains to rolling hills, dense forests, farmlands, dry flatlands and dirt roads.

There is a 10-day section called the Meseta. Daugherty described it as a walk across Texas and Kansas in the dead of summer when everything is brown. It is flat and there is nothing for miles.

During her Camino, Spain was in a historic heat wave which caused Daugherty and her Camino family would get up in the wee hours of the morning walking with headlamps to try to get their day’s worth of walking before it got excruciatingly hot.

The day wasn’t always about just putting one foot in front of another. Along the way pilgrims can experience the architecture, sights, history and folklore of the places they pass through.

Sometimes to pass the time though, Daugherty said you just put your headphones in and put the miles behind you – that was especially true on the long, hot days walking the Meseta. And, there is time to stop and enjoy the towns and experiences in the larger cities along the way.

“We got to enjoy the sights and hospitality of the Spanish people,” Daugherty said.

The first few days of walking you spend time getting to know your Camino family. Finding out where they are from, why they are walking and where they plan to stay the night, she said.

“Some of the people I met, I know more about them than some of the people I have known my entire life because we are spending so much time together having this very, at times, emotional, mental and spiritual experience with the person.”

About half-way through, Daugherty began to question whether she could finish.

“I called home one day and told my mom I couldn’t do it anymore. I was tired. My body was tired and my mind was tired.”

Her mom told her she didn’t have to finish. She could come home.

She knew she would be disappointed if she didn’t finish as she would have to see social media posts of her new Camino family finishing without her.

“I had to say ‘OK Crystal. You are half-way and if you have done the first half, why can’t you do the second half?”

She had to debate with herself if it was a goal worth finishing.

Some may ask Daugherty why she walked 500 miles across a foreign country.

She read books about people and why they walked the Camino and what they got out of it and for her it was spiritual.

“I’ve been a Christian the majority of my life,” she said. “It is spiritual because you have uninterrupted time to talk to God and to be open to whatever He or the Holy Spirit reveals to you, and through the pandemic, life was just on hold for the past couple of years – I needed to remind myself that I can do hard things and I can do hard things with God.”

She arrived in Santiago de Compostela 34 days after she began having taken no rest days and walked into the cathedral at 8:30 a.m. July 24. She walked an average of about 15-20 miles a day with her shortest walks being 10 miles and the longest 20.

She Facetimed her mother as she walked into the square where the huge cathedral stood.

“When you walk into the square, you are just weeping because you have done this really hard thing and that’s when it hit me that God had carried me through.”

Daugherty had injured herself early on and she was overjoyed to have finished the Camino on her own two feet.

“All these different emotions come rushing in once you get into the city and you are standing there in front of the cathedral,” she said. “I wanted to be able to say I walked from the south of France to Santigo de Compostela on the Camino on my own two feet. So when I walked in that’s when it was like this watershed moment, ‘I did this.’”

She said she doesn’t know yet what the big takeaway from the experience is – maybe it would hit her in the future.

“There’s something to walking an ancient pathway that thousands of people have done before you and thousands will after you that is life-changing in a way I am not sure I can put into words.”

One of the doors into the cathedral has a carving that says “Omega and Alpha” which translates as the end and the beginning. The architect deliberately put the words in the reverse order.

“The architect did that because the end of your Camino, walking into Santiago, that is the end of your Camino but the beginning of what happens next ... the completion of the Camino is really just the start of what happens next.”