What the Psychic Told the Pilgrim: A Midlife Misadventure on Spain's Camino de Santiago

by Jane Christmas

Overview

To celebrate her 50th birthday and face the challenges of mid-life, Jane Christmas joins 14 women to hike the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. Despite a psychic’s warning of catfights, death, and a sexy, fair-haired man, Christmas soldiers on. After a week of squabbles, the group splinters and the real adventure begins. In vivid, witty style, she recounts her battles with loneliness, hallucinations of being joined by Steve Martin, as well as picturesque villages and even the fair-haired man. What the Psychic Told the Pilgrim is one trip neither the author nor the reader will forget.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781926685564
Publisher:	Greystone Books
Publication date:	07/01/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	822 KB

About the Author

Jane Christmas worked as a newspaper editor for 25 years and has written for the Hamilton Spectator, the Globe and Mail, and the National Post. She is the author of one other non-fiction book, The Pelee Project: One Woman's Escape from Urban Madness. She has three children and lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 4

Guidebooks use words like "tough" and "hard" to describe the leg of the Camino that crosses the Pyrenees from St. Jean Pied de Port to Roncesvalles.

People who have walked it fix you with a faraway gaze and carefully pick words like "challenging" and "arduous" as if they can't quite reconcile memory with reality. Their comments are tempered by time, and you know what they say about time being a great healer: The "challenging" experience gets polished with each recounting of the tale into a smooth nugget of accomplishment and pride.

Gather round boys and girls while I tell you in the clearest, bluntest language what it's really like.

Crossing the Pyrenees is torture: Imagine Hell under sunny skies.

Unbearable, brutal, wicked, hideous doesn't describe it yet by half. Never has my body or my spirit been pushed or crushed so hard. It was the sort of pain that makes you weep, except you cannot weep because crying requires energy and you have to conserve every drop for the next step. At some point you're practically begging Death to wave his scythe over you and end the suffering.

The Camino is often described as a metaphorical journey through your lifetime. If that's the case then the section from St. Jean over the Pyrenees and into Roncescalles is a metaphor for one's struggle through the birth canal: No wonder we all emerge screaming.

The Pyrenees was a staggering challenge to our little group. Had one of us perished it would not have surprised me. We were over our heads. Several times I contemplated curling up into the fetal position by the side of the path just to rest, but the nice lady at the pilgrim office the day before had told us about a pilgrim who had done precisely that weeks earlier. He was found dead.

It was understandable then that we were all skittish that first day on the Camino simply because of the Pyrenees. Our insistence to start in St. Jean had been made partly because we were purists and partly because we were vain: Women rarely turn down anything described as a "calorie killer."

On May 1, we rose before dawn.

Theresa, Georgina and I conducted our absolutions that morning with feigned confidence while struggling silently with our own levels of disorientation and jet lag. I'm sure I wasn't the only one asking herself: "What the hell am I doing here?"