I’m with my two co-leaders, Brenda Porter and Andre Mallinger, traveling our walking route on the Camino by rental car. We’re spending our first few days in Spain scouting: revisiting the places we’ll be staying, double and triple-checking hotel reservations, finding the best restaurant open on the day we’ll be passing through, determining the best locations for an outdoor writing class on our layover days—making sure all the logistical details are in place.
As we drive through Spain, we’ve been talking through our first group orientation session and who will cover what and have decided what we want to create for an opening ceremony the day our group embarks on our first long walk on the Camino.
In the car and over meals, we’ve discussed leading trips and guiding, sharing different tricks we’ve learned in our respective years of experience managing groups and people. “I never ask someone how they slept,” Brenda told me. “I ask them how they rested.”
Nice, I thought. I jotted that one down. I wanted to remember it.
Since our trip is called “the Creative Camino,” we’ve spent hours discussing best strategies for integrating art and writing into our journey, even as we walk 8-14 miles on most days. Walking that much and that far, there’s no energy for formal classes at the end of day. People want to shower, eat dinner and go to bed. But we’ll have a few layover days to focus on art and writing. Still, even on our walking days, we want to find ways to infuse creative spirit into our journey.
From the outset, we will be stressing to our pilgrims that this isn’t “just a hike.” It’s a pilgrimage and journey of creative exploration. To that end, Brenda has created a beautiful art/writing journal and fully supplied art kit for each person. I’ve brought cut up strips with inspiring quotes to hand out each morning, poems to read on the theme of pilgrimage, and I’ve spent many hours thinking of prompts that can be done quickly and on the go, by the side of the trail, at a rest stop, while waiting for lunch or stragglers.
As the three of us are getting reacquainted as leaders, I’m happy to be with Brenda and Andre again. We were a great team last year. They are both experienced, well-trained wilderness guides. Although the Camino hardly counts as wilderness, I am fully confident that everyone will be very well cared for should any emergency arise.
I have to admit it’s weird to be driving our route instead of walking it, but I’ve been happy to be driving a stick shift through the roundabouts that fill this part of Spain: Galicia. And my jetlag hasn’t been bad.
All went well until last night. While having dinner across the street from our hotel in Portomarin, eating sauteed pimiento peppers (sold as padrones in the US), drinking mediocre wine, and imbibing local olives, thick wedged bread, and the local version of Calgo Gallego (the basic potato-vegetable soup served in every restaurant on the Camino), we learned that there was a “youth festival” occurring here this weekend, in fact it was beginning that very night. We could hear them warming up, too, lots of loud bass, immediately next door to our hotel. Uh-oh—better go to sleep fast!
But alas.
At nine, just as we paid our “quenta” and headed to bed, pounding music, yelling, and a hyped-up DJ began filling every inch of psychic space in our heads. I’m not sure how I managed to go to sleep, maybe I was lucky that I was still jetlagged, my body mostly on US time, but I went to sleep with earplugs. But now it’s 2:30 in the morning and I am WIDE AWAKE. The music sounds like it’s pounding directly on the other side of the bedstead in my hotel room, smacking all my senses, although I can’t smell it—lost my sense of smell to Covid a year ago.
As I gave up any pretense of sleep, I texted Brenda and Andre in the room next door. They said they were working next door, so I guess that’s what I’m going to do now, too.
The music seemed to be building to a final crescendo half an hour ago (2:00 am), like the final extended giant fireworks orgasm at the end of a great fireworks show, but no, the party and the music are still going strong. The crowd is cheering. This is Spain. I guess I can expect this to go all night.
All I can say is thank God our travelers haven’t arrived yet. This would be a real bummer of a first night for someone who’s been planning and dreaming of the Camino for months and has just flown across an ocean for a sacred pilgrimage. What a welcome!
But as they say in the writing trade, “Bad for Life, Good for Story.” At least I’m getting a blog post out of it.
The odd thing is that this exact thing happened to me twice before this summer when I was in Bali. I was with my friend Nancy Gertz, who I’d brought along as a companion for my first healing retreat there. It was the night before our travelers were arriving, when our sweet, soft-spoken hotel host at our quiet, peaceful seaside resort informed us that there was going to be a huge Balinese wedding with a DJ happening next door in a few hours. The music that night literally shook the walls of Nancy’s hotel room, and they projected a giant strobe light across the beach lighting up all of Candidasa Lagoon. I was grateful our guests weren’t there that time, too. And then it happened a second time, in between my two groups of Bali. I guess you could say I’ve been lucky? So far, none of my travelers have been subjected to this.
Right now, it’s 3:30 AM and I’m trying not to think ahead to how I’m going to feel tomorrow (though it is already tomorrow!). I just took some Advil and did some hand laundry in the sink. I did bring my mahjong card with me. Maybe I’ll play a few rounds of online mahjong on my laptop while praying I get some more sleep tonight. PS. Update at 4:30 AM. Music still going strong. Tomorrow, just ask me how I “rested.”