LITMIR.BIZ

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took off his sneakers, which rubbed against the tender spot, and walked in his sandals. It helped a little, but he still settled into what another pilgrim, weeks later, would describe as the “tunnel of pain.”

      That’s how I found myself in the unusual position of walking ahead of him when a young woman with a floppy hat and a backpack strode out of a farm driveway. “That’s not the way,” she called cheerily, in English. She explained she’d taken a wrong turn and found herself awkwardly standing in a barnyard.

      She mistook a driveway for the Camino. In hindsight, I should have paid more attention to that.

      I was, however, once again infatuated by the sound of English and happy to have someone to distract me through the final few kilometers of a challenging day, so we walked on together up a shaded country road.

      Lara was Swiss. She’d walked all of the Camino Francés in Spain a few years earlier but was here in France for just a few days. She’d catch a bus back home in the morning.

      GR65 broke off from the paved road, and we followed a rutted dirt road that took us deeper into the woods. Eric lagged behind, the pain in his ankle making him unusually antisocial. Lara and I chatted about home and travel, but after a while, I mentioned that I hadn’t seen a trail marker for some time. Typically, the red and white stripes of GR65 pop up every few minutes. They’re painted onto fences, the backs of signs, trees, and even on rocks if the ground is flat. They aren’t always easy to spot—walking the Chemin de Saint Jacques often felt like an epic game of Where’s Waldo—but we were following a wooden fence that I thought should be marked.

      Lara brushed aside my concern. “Oh no, this is right. This feels like the Camino.”

      Well, she’s done this before, I thought, as we continued down a steep hill. Ten minutes later, the road ended at an intersection with another dirt road. There were still no stripes to indicate which way to go, and our guidebook didn’t mention an intersection. We were officially lost.

      We dithered around, aching and tired. If we followed the new road in the right direction, we reasoned, it would lead to Les Estrets. But which way? We looked out over a valley, but there were no towns in sight. With no map, no GPS, and no idea when we’d lost our way, there was no way to know.

      Our only real choice was to turn around and trudge, silently this time, back up the hill we’d just descended, until we came to the place where we’d missed the flaglike symbol of red and white stripes that indicated a turn off the farm road and onto a smaller footpath. It was late afternoon, and Lara’s reservation was for a town past Les Estrets. She was worried about arriving after dark, so with a wave, she sped up and disappeared down the trail.

      Eric never pointed out that it was me who led us astray. He didn’t have to. We limped forward for the final three kilometers. Our detour cost us an hour and a half, and it was almost 5:00 when we stumbled down a final rocky embankment and into Les Estrets. I was exhausted, and my feet felt like they were on fire.

      Like a horse that senses its barn, though, I sped up when the end was finally near. Eric was at least a block behind me when I arrived at the gîte. The owner, a gregarious man with a big voice, met me at the door.

      “Réserve à deux Americans,” I managed, figuring that those were the important words, even if my syntax was wrong. When Gwen made our reservation, she’d given the host our nationality, not our names. It’s not like there were other Americans out here who were going to show up and take our spot.

      “Ah, non!” The man had a florid face and rough English. “You are too late. I give the reservation away.”

      For a second, I believed him, and panic stung my eyes. By the next second, I realized I didn’t care if he meant it. I wasn’t leaving.

      “No.” I sat on the bench by the door and started to unlace my shoes. (Most gîtes required us to leave walking shoes outside, which made sense, considering how many cow fields we crossed.) I repeated: “Réserve à deux Americans.”

      Eric arrived at that moment to find me looking mutinous and the jokester proprietor looking sheepish. Of course, we did still have réservés. We weren’t even the last to arrive, although Eugene had made it ahead of us.

      Despite his injury, Eric soldiered on, showering and doing his washing before he allowed himself to rest. Me? I collapsed onto my assigned bed in our room for four and lay there for a long time, on the verge of tired tears. Could I really do this every day for months?

      The gîte was full, and the communal dinner that night was noisy. Eugene, Eric, and I staked out an English-speaking corner, and we were joined by a Dutchman named Jan and a young Frenchman named Xavier. Across the room the group we’d met at the orientation in Le Puy flirted with our host and chatted among themselves like kids at camp. I christened them the Eight Walkers.

      The wine flowed, perhaps particularly into Jan’s glass. He was a smallish, gnome-like man with rough, guttural English and endearing round glasses. In basic, fractured English, we all connected as our host brought out generous salads and steaming bowls of wild boar that he bragged he’d shot himself. We laughed and carried on through the cheese plates and dessert. I forgot that my feet ached. I felt another glimmer of the Camino I was looking for.

      And then, precisely at 9:00, the dishes and wine carafes were whisked away and, feeling a bit bewildered by the abrupt change in emotional energy, I followed my fellow pilgrims off to bed.

      Everything I’d heard about late-night life in Europe? Forget it. Pilgrims are asleep by 10:00.

       The winding medieval streets of Saint-Côme-d’Olt

OF FEET AND FAIRY TALES

      Walking through L’Aubrac was like walking through the legends and stories Eric read as a kid. We’d reached the true highlands of the Massif Central, irregular rolling hills of open, treeless country. It was too early in the year for the herds of cows and sheep that would fill the pastures in summer, so the barren landscape was broken only by stone fences built from the rocks that dotted the landscape.

      At least, that’s what Eric told me it looked like. He took it all in with wide eyes and a permanent grin. The idea that a place like this was real made him forget his tender ankle. Four days into a three-month hike, he was already talking about how to come back, dreaming about becoming a perma-pilgrim like Gabriel.

      I, on the other hand, trudged along that day with my head down and my feet screaming. I resented every rock on the path that poked my tender, swollen arches. I hurt too much to appreciate the landscape around me.

      On the outside, I looked fine. I didn’t have a single ampoule, the blisters that have plagued pilgrims for centuries. And my body above the ankles—apart from the outraged complaints from my lungs when I had to climb a hill—was fine. My shoulders had adjusted to my pack, and my knees and shins never complained. But my feet. My poor, tender, inflamed feet. I had no idea what was wrong with them, but I was pretty sure they were ruining my—and worse, Eric’s—entire Camino.

      We started calling my feet The Princesses, because they felt every pea-sized pebble in the road. I set out every morning feeling fine. After a couple hours of walking, the tenderness would kick in. After another hour, each step sent sharp pain straight through me. It felt like I was constantly walking on giant bruises, and every uneven surface in the path was agony.

      The only remedy was to stop regularly, take off my shoes, rub my arches back into peace, and rest. But I was traveling with a mountain goat who practically skipped across his fairy-tale land with his own set of worries, like whether we would get to our destination early enough to do all of what he called “the things” (claiming beds, unpacking bags, taking showers, doing laundry, etc.) before everyone else

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