Episode 7 – The People You Meet Along Life’s Way

We came to appreciate the Meseta much more than expected.

After the physical challenge of the first part of the Camino, there was something welcome about its simplicity. Long stretches of open land. Wheat fields. Huge skies. Very little to distract you.

It was quiet, and I think we needed the quiet.

One of our favorite evenings was in Frómista. We had a wonderful dinner at our hotel with our host, Octavio, and three fellow pilgrims we had met along the way—Danny, Lourdes and Julie. Good food, lots of laughter and people who had been strangers not long before sitting around a table together. That happens often on the Camino.

A few days later, we arrived in León, where we would begin the third and final stage of the Camino—the spiritual stage—and where our journey was about to change in another important way.

Until now, most of this Camino has been just Chuck and me. I have loved every bit of our time together. Day after day, mile after mile, just the two of us.

But in León, six new pilgrims arrived to walk with us.

They came by plane, train and automobile, from different places and by different routes. And with them came almost every chapter of our lives.

Kathy and I met in kindergarten. Marian and I met in second grade. The three of us grew up together at St. Madeleine in Pomona. We were little girls together long before any of us could have imagined the lives ahead of us—or that 60-some years later we would meet again in Spain to walk the Camino.

Marian and I went on to Loyola Marymount together and, years later, our paths crossed again when we worked together at St. Joseph. Jo Ann came into my life through St. Joseph and later became part of my City of Hope journey as well. Dave is here beside her.

Dan and Tanya represent another chapter—the years our family spent at Serra and SMCHS, friendships that began through our children and became our own.

When I look at the six of them, I see more than friends. I see the different seasons of our lives.

Childhood. School. Marriage and family. Work. Raising children. And now this season.

Different beginnings. Different stories. Different roads.

And now we are walking the same road.

Maybe that is part of what this pilgrimage is teaching me. We each have our own path, and no one can walk all of it with us. People join us for different stretches. Some are there almost from the beginning. Others come much later. Some stay for a long time, and some for only a season.

But occasionally, if we are fortunate, those different paths come together again.

Ours have.

And for this part of the journey, we get to walk together.