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By the time this column assaults your reddened eyes, Christmas will be a fast-fading memory, and I will have walked the final 60 miles of the Camino trail in five days. I will end in Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, Spain, final resting place of the Apostle James, or so they say.

At least that’s the game plan. This shouldn’t be too grueling, as I generally cover about five miles of rugged country every day with my dogs. I’m in reasonable shape for a 74-year-old codger.

How I shall accomplish this hike is one thing. Why is entirely another.

The Camino de Santiago is not an ordinary hiking trail; it’s a pilgrimage. People walk to fulfill promises made to God when a family member is ill, a marriage or career is beginning or ending, that sort of thing. These are true pilgrims. In the past, people walked to collect indulgences, a sort of divine grace meant to shorten the time they’d spend in Purgatory. Nowadays, the camino’s become a sort of self-help therapy.

I can’t claim any of those as reasons. I am not a true pilgrim. I’m doing the walk, as far as I can see, to keep my wife company. To me, walking anywhere without at least one dog at my side is foreign to my very being — like drinking tonic without gin. Unnatural. Pointless. Uncivilized.

But the die is cast. My boots are oiled, my rucksack is packed with a single change of clothes. There’s a scallop shell — the traditional pilgrim emblem hung on the back of it. I’ll carry a walking stick, but I’ve been doing that for years, ever since I hurt myself chasing a donkey. But that’s another story.

Hundreds of thousands of hikers and bikers cross northern Spain on the Camino de Santiago every year. They cannot all be “real” pilgrims. Some do it simply for “sport,” or because it’s a cheap holiday. “Real” pilgrims — and also the penny-pinchers — stay in albergues, bare-bones bunkhouses something like youth hostels. For a bunkbed in a big room shared with 20 sweaty travelers, they pay about $8 a night. They share dinners, shower rooms, and a supersonic serenade of snoring, described by one wag as “Midnight on the Serengeti.”

We will not be joining this merry but malodorous throng. We are booked into comfy hotels each night with our own bathroom, heating, and double bed. There are limits to our fortitude. Albergues far exceed them.

Some single people walk The Way in order to meet a mate. Others do it for their health. A few do “stunt caminos,” on roller skates, camels, or to raise funds or “awareness” of a particular injustice or disease. One young Korean (there are a remarkable number on the Camino) told me his reason for walking some 20 miles a day, for 33 days in succession, was “to relax.” (Life in South Korea must be hectic indeed.)

I trudged the whole 500-mile trail in 2002, so I really should know better. Still, I was a stripling 61-year-old back then, and still in possession of the greater part of my physical faculties. Circumstances have changed a lot since those days, for both me and the Camino, and we shall see if either of us still have anything in common. If I survive, you will be told.

If I don’t, check the obituary page.

Patrick O’Gara, a former Blade editor, was a journalist all his working life. He now lives in northern Spain with six dogs, a cat, a canary, seven hens, and a tolerant American wife.

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