Day 33: Pedrouza- Santiago de Compostela
Distance: 20.4 km
Since I didn’t sleep and instead rolled around while reading the internet, I was ready to get going at around eight that morning. We packed our gear up, had breakfast, and headed out to Santiago.
On the final day, quite a bit of the trail runs close to the airport so it’s not all that picturesque. More picturesque than near the airport of Birmingham, but not incredible.
There were a fair amount of statues and art installations along the trail and we snapped a few pics. In truth, the final day’s trail was boring. We spent the whole afternoon walking and talking about our favorite Camino moments. We discussed people we were thankful to meet and how they enriched the Camino experince. We listed our final peaks and pits for the Camino. I think we managed to talk our way to Santiago de Compostela and some how are legs followed.
We arrived in Santiago at around 1 PM. We didn’t get to the church until closer to 2. It was still a bit of a walk into the city. We kept having to deal with the weather as the sky could not determine whether to rain, mist, be cloudy, or switch to hot and sunshiny.
When we finally arrived at the ”stopping point” (no small feat since the arrows stop and small seashells on the street/sidewalk start to lead the way), Elizabeth and I were a little grumpy.
Bagpipes were playing. We were accosted by women hawking places to stay. Views of scaffolding. More rain. We felt as if what we had accomplished was being diminished by outside influence. It seems silly to say that because we had been working on the self for the last 30+ days, and we so quickly regressed back to individuals who were annoyed at the smallest thing.
But eventually, as we stood and looked at the church, we felt a small sense of accomplishment. We had walked for 33 days, each and every day. Rain, snow, sleet, hail, traffic, cities, snoring, aches, pains, puking, mud, muck, and plenty of cow shit, and we had finished what we set out to do. But we still felt hollow.
We would not feel whole for two more days.
After taking a few pictures and seeing some people we recognized from along the way, we headed to get our official paperwork.
Each and every day of the Camino, you get a stamp on your pilgrim passport. At the beginning of Camino the stamps are not necessary for the official pilgrim certificate. If you want the pilgrim certificate, you only need two stamps a day for the last 100km to Santiago. This is in order to “prove” that you walked what you said you did. Every place you stay has a stamp. Most all of the restaurants have stamps. Random street vendors have stamps. Every place has it’s own special stamp so it is neat to have all these stamps in your pilgrim “passport”. On the Camino, the pilgrim passport is about as important as your real passport.
So we made it over to the office and there is security. Why anyone would want to terrorize a building that only hands out certificates to smelly people who have walked hundreds of miles is beyond me. The guy in charge is giving the pilgrims a hard time making each and everyone empty out their entire backpack.
Our group decided that we will leave our packs out on the street before having to unpack yet again. We’ve been having to unload these stupid things for 30 days. We only do it once a day and were not gonna do it again. I said I don’t want the sheet of paper bad enough so I’ll just wait out here. Luckily, he was called back to more important duties and a young guy in an over sized blazer barely looked at our pilgrims passport and waved us through.
Amazing how unhappy I could get in such a short span of time. Patience is still something that we are working on. Of course this entire time Elizabeth said nothing and never would have complained.
We got our certificate and some other document for a few extra euros. When they fill out your certificate they put where you started (St. Jean), how far you walked (775 km), and your name in Latin. Elizabeth was Elizabethum. Clay was nowhere to be found. The person filling out the certificate asked around and searched through a stack of papers with obscure names but to no avail. So he said he was just going to put Clay.
I wasn’t having it. I didn’t walk 800 KM so my certificate could be in English. Before this exact moment though I had no idea the certificate would be in Latin, but still, even the name Clay deserves to be Latinized.
“Do you know the name Clay in Latin?” he asked. No.
“What about clay?” Nope.
I forgot that I could have done a quick google translate which gave me three options: lutum, creta, and bolus. Instead, I went with the little Latin I know. Clay is/means from the earth. Earth=Terra. So my certificate shows my name as Terra. Much better than Clay.
From here the gang split up. We headed off to our hotel, graciously paid for by my parents. It was probably the first time they were certain we were not going to die in Spain, since we were staying in a hotel, owned by an American hotel conglomerate.
We picked up our luggage we had shipped from Pamplona and relaxed a bit. Before splitting with our group we made plans for dinner. When the time came we headed out in our fresh, new clothes (Aka clothing other than what we had carried on our back for a month), and headed back out to meet our group for dinner. We had not seen each other in 5 hours, which was the longest time we had been apart in weeks.
They barely recognized us. We were wearing clothes and shoes that they had never seen before. We looked Christian again after looking like ragged, tattered pilgrims for the last several weeks. We celebrated the end of our final day on the Camino like we did all the nights previously… lots of wine, bread,and conversation
cornetravel 
Dear Creta, That was a little anticlimatic. No bands, no fireworks, no longwinded speeches. Just here’s your stamp. Was it worth it? I know the answer is yes and you would do it all again.
Love y’all more than you know.
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