All posts tagged: Camino de Santiago de Compostela

Day 1 Camino to Santiago de Compostela – from Astorga to Rabanal de Camino

Published by

I follow the French Way or The Way of St. James which this ancient pilgrim path is also known as, just like the last time, but this time starting in the region of Castilla y León that borders to Galicia at O Cebreiro. It will be fun to discover a new part of the Camino.  It’s a beautiful start and feels wonderfully flat! In reality it’s a steady ascent from Santa Catalina to Rabanal, however I stop every 5 km as I had planned, for a coffee, lunch or something to drink, and luckily there are cafes evenly distributed along the trail.   Passing pretty and very rustic doors on the way. I knew that there has been a tremendous rise of pilgrims since my last Camino in 2012. The statistics show a staggering 438,589 thousand people finished the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in 2022, as opposed to 192,488 in 2012, and indeed, there are a lot of pilgrims on the trail today. However, I enjoy having brief chats with people from many parts of the …

My Camino to Santiago de Compostella 2023 – Arriving in Astorga

Published by

This year the Camino called me again…  The first time I walked part of the Camino to Santiago de Compostela was 2012. At that time, I was living in Malmö in the south of Sweden and working at IKEA Communications, the in-house marketing agency of IKEA. This meant that I had to join the ranks of IKEA’s many commuting employees, spending a good three hours on the train every day, starting at the crack of dawn. The upside of this was that I got to know and become friends with a good many of my co-workers.  Anyway, one Friday evening in May, while we commuted back to Malmö, Gen, one of my interior designer friends from Quebec told me about walking the whole 800 km stretch of the Camino when she was in her twenties. Something struck a chord inside of me when I listened to her story. The whole of the next day I thought about it and the next day I found myself at my computer Googling away. On Monday when we met …