These rest days are equal parts horrible and lovely. The inactivity feels necessary but I just don’t know what to do with myself after a while. am writing from the ghostly dining room of the massive convent of San Nicolas in Villafranca. The walls are asylum-white and the iron shielded windows are eight feet off the ground. It is furnished with elementary school chairs and foldout tables with disposable covers that should have been disposed of long ago. Bread crumbs and salami grease mark the presence of my grandfather pilgrims who stayed here before me. Days in pilgrim-time are like generations. When you go beyond the John Brierley towns by bus, taxi, or foot power, you enter in to a new wave of pilgrims. Stay behind in a town for a day or two and you will meet your grandchildren.
The albergue was especially difficult to find given that it bears no marking of its name- the only hint to peregrinos being an arrow in the back of the parking lot with the tell-tale Camino cockle shell emblem, and “ALBERGUE” in all-caps.
I tried to access the wifi but my phone could not locate the source. The Hospitalera directed me beyond a nearby double-door and down through a tomb-like hallway and eventually I was able to pick up a signal. I sat down in a faded corduroy armchair across from the window and looked out on to a fallow courtyard: broken stained glass, dead and dry ornamental foliage and over-turned patio furniture were dismal reminders that this is the off-season of tourism. But the cackling of a dozen or so American voices I heard down a distant hallway told me otherwise.

At once, there was an approaching thunder of rolling suitcases accompanied by the steps and squeaks of pristine hiking boots that probably still smelled like packing peanuts. These people were the sort of chatty that you can only be when you’ve just stepped off a tour bus with flat screen TV’s and recliner chairs, cup holders and enough electrical sockets for each passenger to juice their array of devices. The sort of chatty you can only be when you are eager to begin your real live, in the flesh Camino Experience Extraordinaire. These Americans pass me one by one and in cheerful English wish me “good morning” but their chirpiness is an utter outrage and so I pretend we don’t speak the same language. They file in to what I now realize are decked-out private hotel rooms with their own bathrooms, tiny bottles of shampoo and televisions and overhead lighting that they have full say over it’s OFF and ON position.
They pinch their faces at the mud on my pants, pack, boots. Just you wait.
I decide to check out the hotel side of the building and see how it compares to the pilgrim digs. I follow the resonating ghostly jazz music that echoes through the stony chambers of the old convent. I limp down a narrow staircase and come to a set of restrooms just adjacent to grand formal dining room. I open the door marked “bar” and find the source of the jazz music, but the bar is ghostly and unoccupied and I feel like I’ve stepped in to a scene from The Shining. A little spooked, I turn around to go back to the casual part of the building where I am most at home. I go back through the bathroom to the albergue.

I’m eager for my chance to get an inside-glance at the maintenance of these high-occupancy, low-cost albergues: are the mattress covers changed? How thorough of a cleaning do the toilets get? The molding soup of semi-solid strawberries in the communal refrigerator is not a sign that any of this gets done on a regular basis. In any case, I am comfortable and happy. I fit right in with the slime and grime.

I return to my dormitory and collapse on my twin-size bed. I bathe in the light of the white walls, white floor tiles, white bedsheets and stare at the perfect blue sky outside the enormous window.