Chicago-area friends,
Don’t miss this opportunity to view the film “Walking the Camino: Six Ways to Santiago” on Wed Sept 2, 2015 7-9pm. Meet documentary “star” and co-producer Annie O’Neil. This is one of my fave Camino films. Learn about her next film project and share Camino stories over wine after the show… wish I could be there!
Monthly Archives: August 2015
Lourdes Pilgrimage: Lourdes to Santiago Camino
I arrived in Lourdes, France, trusting that there would be “room at the inn.” The albergue that catered to people walking Les Chemins de St Jacques (The Way of St James) had not returned any of my email requests for a bed. The week before, the Lourdes Tourist Office assured me that the proprietor was out of town and would respond once he returned. So I walked by faith, trusting that even if no beds were available at Accueil Jacquaire “La Ruche” when I showed up, that there would be space somewhere in the mountain town of 15,000 for a pilgrim to lay her head. Hey, even Baby Jesus found a manger to sleep in as his family journeyed to Bethlehem.
Lourdes is known as a center for prayer and healing for the Catholic Church. Six million people travel to the town in the picturesque Gave de Pau River Valley every year in hopes of healing for themselves, friends or family members. In 1858, teenager Bernadette Soubirous saw the Virgin Mary in a muddy grotto not far from the river. The Virgin appeared to the peasant girl eighteen times, and during one of the appearances, the Virgin told Bernadette to drink the water. But there was no source of water in the grotto. Bernadette felt compelled to dig in the mud with her hands, and soon she unearthed a spring. Bernadette drank from the spring and prayed. Later, others were miraculously healed after drinking the water. Today that small spring is the water source for the bath houses where believers are submerged in the healing waters and for the fountains from which devotees drink thousands of gallons of water.
Because the town is now one of the world’s most important pilgrimage sites, I thought it would be a perfect place to start my +500-mile walk from France to Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain. The classic route, called Camino Frances, begins in St Jean Pied de Port, France, at the eastern foot of the Pyrénées Mountains near the border of France and Spain and continues across northern Spain to Santiago. Lourdes is only 93 walking miles southeast of St Jean Pied de Port, and I could walk forest trails and farm roads that meander along the foothills of the Pyrénées. (Lourdes to SJPP is 93 miles/149 km.)
Since foot traffic on Camino Frances has increased so much in the ten years since I did my first pilgrimage, I desired to start on a road less traveled. The route from Lourdes to St Jean Pied de Port seemed to fit the bill. Fewer people and more rustic accommodations might better mimic my first Camino experience.
However, because the Lourdes Camino route is typically traveled by regional hikers, the only guidebooks that I could find were in French. Even on-line, route-following instructions were in French. Google Translate and other free translation services didn’t seem to get the detailed, cryptic instructions right. “Cut a road and continue straight. After a closed, follow the path paved route and continue the length to the edge of the Louts.” Hmmm… Yet I had printed the cryptic instructions and bound them with pages of maps from the French guidebook, La Voie des Piemonts un Chemin de Serenite by François Lepère and Yvette Terrien.
I reviewed my loose leaf notebook on the Air France flight from Paris to Tarbes-Lourdes airport, still hopeful that I would find a place to sleep that night. Since the Lourdes Tourist Office boasted more hotel rooms than any other city in France, besides Paris, I figured my chances were on par with Baby Jesus – the Lord would provide. I sent up a silent prayer, “Let this go smoothly, Lord.”
I shared a cab with two other visitors, and David, the friendly driver knew the way to Accueil Jacquaire “La Ruche”. I tapped lightly on the door, and when no one answered, I pushed it open. “Bon jour,” I called out. A young American woman came down the stairs.
“Hi, I’m Rachel. We’re making dinner upstairs. Do you want to stay for dinner?” Rachel offered.
“Oh, yes!” I answered. “Is there a bed for me?”
“We have plenty, put your backpack in here,” she said showing me to a room with two bunk beds. “You may choose the top or the bottom.”
“After dinner will there be time to go to the candlelight procession?” I asked. It was the desire of my heart to start my pilgrimage to Spain with the prayer vigil and processional that happens every night at 9:30. 
Hundreds of people from all over the world come together for prayer, many wheeling their loved ones in wheelchairs or gurneys. I had seen it all on YouTube and wanted to experience it for myself.
“Yes, there will be plenty of time,” Rachel said. “We’ll all go down together, we 
have several other pilgrims here tonight. Jean Luis and G.G. have the candles here. She pointed to a basket of tall candles with Lourdes-appropriate wind shades.
Stacey gets her shell from Hospitalero Jean Luis Doux, who cuts a yellow cord to tie it to her pack.
“Are you just starting your Camino?” When I nodded yes, my new friend responded, “Well, we’ll have to get you your shell tomorrow before you leave.” The scallop shell is a symbol of St. James and is worn my pilgrims to denote that they are on a pilgrimage to Santiago, where the bones of St. James rest.
It was my second lesson of my Lourdes to Santiago Camino: do not worry. “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” Philippians 4:6-7. So if that was my second lesson, what was the first lesson of this Camino? Well, that’s another story…
Stacey Wittig is a travel writer who is currently working on her second book, Spiritual & Walking Guide: Lourdes to St Jean Pied de Port. Order her first book, Spiritual & Walking Guide: Leon to Santiago on Amazon.
Accueil Jacquaire “La Ruche” : 21 rue Pau, Lourdes | Tel: 05 62 97 98 21| jl.doux@club-internet.fr
Taxi David – VIP Excursions: Tel: 06 81 89 09 88
Camino Brings Together Uncommon Friendships
Zuzana and I are the odd couple – she 27 years old and a beauty, me at 60 feeling like an old woman for maybe the first time I my life. We met while walking Les Chemins de St Jacques – the Camino de Santiago – near Lourdes, France. She calls me her guardian angel but to me, she is my caregiver. She gladly lets me use her phone recharger and patiently assists me when I can’t get it to work. As she makes dinner for the two of us, I sit and talk about Camino etiquette while she chops fresh vegetables.
“What is that word?” the native of Slovakia asks.
“It’s French for something like ‘how to behave’,” I offer.
I instruct her on blister care and she teaches me how to say blister in Spanish: ambule. Zuzana has been working in Spain for the past several years as an architect. Her command of the Spanish language is impeccable, but how would I know, I’m a bumbling student of the language?
Zuzana is a vegetarian and nutrition nut; I’m having withdrawals from Lay’s Potato Chips. She’s getting me hooked on Chia seeds, “Breakfast of Champions” for Aztec warriors, or so claims the label. According to the package, Aztec ancients could run for fourteen hours on one meal of Chia seeds.
When she asks me if I found her hiking pole tip, I pull it out of my pocket. You see, she walks the pilgrimage route very much ahead of me. And I find the things that she drops: a hiking pole tip and a pair of socks pinned together with a clothes pin.
I actually met Zuzana’s socks before I met her – or anyone else – on this remote pilgrimage route. There are few pilgrims walking from Lourdes to St Jean Pied de Port, which is why Zuzana would make dinner for just the two of us – there were no others in most of the albergues where we stay. I found her socks on the first day out of Lourdes. They were lying in a rain puddle in front of a big sign describing the abundant nature of the surrounding area. I could tell that the socks had been recently dropped, so I picked them up. I toted them until the next day when long-legged Soren, with whom I was trying to keep up, begged me for the third time to get rid of some weight from my 30-pound pack.
“Stacey, darling! You’ve carried all that long enough. It’s time you got rid of something! I don’t mean to lecture, or pontificate, but REALLY!” exclaimed Soren pontificating.
“Oh, no. Go ahead — I need to hear it,” I interrupted. It was my second day of walking and both the temperature and humidity were high. The sweat was pouring down my red face. I left the socks and a baseball hat at a bus stop in a small country village. It wasn’t much to leave behind, but it was a beginning. Eventually I would mail fourteen copies of my Camino book forward to Burgos, Spain. I carried the books so I could donate them, one at a time to albergues along the way. But since my book was a spiritual and walking guide for the last weeks of the walk, I really didn’t want to leave them until I got closer to the endpoint.
I met Zuzana the following day, and when she mentioned that she had lost her socks, I shot a “look” to Soren. Later Soren, who planned to cross the Pyrénées at Somport, turned west and bid us goodbye. Zuzanna and I continued our walk north-ish along the foothills of the Pyrénées. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Solo travel opens up possibilities for uncommon friendships. I would never guess that a young girl in the prime of her life would ever want to be friends with me, a sixty-year-old woman. Yet the Camino brings together people who have something special to share with each other.
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Stacey Wittig is a travel writer who is currently working on her second book, Spiritual & Walking Guide: Lourdes to St Jean Pied de Port. Order her first book, Spiritual & Walking Guide: Leon to Santiago on Amazon.
Ionut Preda: Inspiration on Camino de Santiago
Ionut Preda dripped a blood red drop of hot wax onto my pilgrim credential and then quickly pressed a metal sealer into the congealing liquid. His seal left the impression of two bare footprints on the passport-like credential that I carried with me during this 500-mile trek across northern Spain. This flimsy piece of folded paper proved that I was a pilgrim and allowed me overnight access to albergues or pilgrim accommodations. It was stamped and dated by albergue hosts to ensure that I didn’t sojourn too long in one town and overstay my pilgrim status. The credential was also proof that I had actually been to these places along the route so I could earn a Compostela from the Catholic Church at the endpoint, Santiago de Compostela, the resting place of the bones of St. James the Greater.
“I love looking at my credential,” Robert from Holland had explained earlier. “I can tell you a story an hour long about each one of these stamps. It is such a good way to remember my journey.” And so pilgrims like Robert and me collected stamps or sellos from restaurants, churches and wayside attractions like the one we were at now. Sometimes you had to pay an entrance fee to get the imprint from a rubber stamp, like at the cathedral in Leon. Other times you needed to be a paying customer to receive a stamp as at the bar at Orison.
Yet at this humble wayside attraction, merely two banquet tables set end-to-end at the edge of the roadside, the extravagant wax stamp (the only I saw during my 36-day trek) was offered by donativo or freewill offering. From the table where Ionut Preda performed the stamping ritual hung several newspaper clippings.
“Yo quiero caminar” professed one newspaper headline over a full-color photo of a tired pilgrim in front of the Santiago Cathedral. “I want to walk.” Ionut Preda
standing behind the table pointed to the photo and said, “That’s me.”
I bent down to look closely at the newspaper clippings. “But this man has only one leg,” I said.
Ionut Preda stepped out from behind the table and raised his right leg, revealing a clunky prosthesis. “I walked Camino de Santiago with this,” he said. I suddenly felt ashamed that I had been feeling sorry for myself because my feet were sore. I soon learned that Ionut Preda was a very special man, a Paralympic athlete that worked with kids in his gymnasium that was located here, on the edge of the Camino de Santiago between Palas de Rei and Melide, Spain.
The athlete who lost his right foot after an accident with a mechanical crane at age eight has overcome his loss to win more than 100 national and international medals.
“My road was not easy,” the native of Timisoara, Romania said in Spanish on his
website. “…Over the years, I came to have a relationship with God, and every time the idea of helping child amputees who need prostheses, motivate them to do sport, to integrate into society, show that you can lead a normal life it grows within me.”
“Traveling, God gave me the opportunity to meet a great woman who today is my wife and Mr. Emanuel rewarded us with our son. They fill me with motivation and desire to leave a legacy, ‘If I can, you can too’.”
Paralympic athlete Ionut Preda and author Stacey Wittig
On the second table, Ionut Preda sold athletic shirts sporting his logo and slogan “Mas de Camino” or “More than a Road.” My companions and I bought the brightly colored shirts and continued on our way no longer tired, but refreshed from having met the inspiring athlete.
Now when I look at my credential and see the imprint of two perfect bare feet, I think of the man with one foot who inspires children to be all they can be. Like Robert, I can look at that one stamp and tell a story that will last for an hour…or years.
Ionut Preda, Paralympic Athlete
info@elparalimpicoviajero.es
(+34) 610 575 883
(+34) 629 688 471
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