Dispatches - 27 July 2025 - A Blown Knee and Coming to Terms (Again)

"Well, that didn't go as planned..." That's my response to Bumble's prompt asking what the title of my autobiography would be called. It's also how I would describe the first week of my first leg of the Wayfarer Expedition.

I set off from Roncesvalles at 06h30 on July 21st, my birthday. It was a cool, drizzly morning one expects in the Pyrenees mountains. The first day of the Camino de Santiago is the hardest, and not just because it is the first day. It is a twenty-six-kilometre slog from 100 meters elevation to over 1400 meters. For my skydiver friends, that's like climbing from the ground up past break-off altitude. It took me more than ten hours, a solid six to seven were uphill. I was carrying everything on my back: my backpack, my camping gear, and my backpack. It wasn't bad, but it was slow going. The weight didn't get to me; the uphills did. Watch a video of me from my travels or read my first book, and you will know that I hate uphills. Even so, I made it, only slightly worse for wear.

The next morning, I set off for Zubiri at about 07h45. By about 10h30, I knew I had a problem. It wasn't the weight; it was my good ankle on the downhills (I have a bad ankle and a bad knee from my military days, and they aren't on the same leg). Something was hurting, and not in the painful workout way. Something was wrong. By the halfway point, it was near unbearable. By the time I had a mile left in the day, I was taking breaks constantly. This was where the weight got to me, because there were no benches or elevated places to take off my pack. Every time I took it off, I had to hoist it up. Then, at just one kilometre left, my bad ankle started popping. Loudly. I knew exactly what it was. The mostly-downhill, mostly-stone pathways strained it too much. Without much choice, I limped my way into Zubiri, convinced I should not be hiking anymore. It was a sad realization that totally deflated me, but the fact was my bad joints from the military days just couldn't take hours and hours of ground pounding day-in and day-out anymore, especially when it was on concrete.

So, I took the bus to Pamplona, where I endeavoured to rest up for two days. I hadn't intended on staying longer than the night, but at least I got to frequent some of my favourite restaurants, attend a Catholic mass, and re-evaluate my life and the expedition. In conversations with bartenders, baristas, and attendants, they all said the same thing: don't worry about it. It happens, and the Camino is about more than just finishing a walk.

Which is how I ended up in Estella during the Medieval Fair. I decided to spend two days in once city, then jump ahead two stages, spend two days in the next city, and so on. That would give me time to alternate travel/rest day and a day exploring churches, monasteries, and anything else the towns would have to offer, like Medieval Fairs and patron saint festivities. In Estella, the two are back-to-back, so the city has two straight weeks of festivals. I passed through Puente la Reina's fiesta on the way to Estella, and I will outright miss Logroño's, but c'est la vie. At least I would get to see some of the Camino's pueblos that I wouldn't otherwise be able to enjoy. Better for the eventual book, or at least that's what I keep telling myself.

Unfortunately, in Estella, my bad knee started hurting pretty bad. I know this pain (in the present tense, because it hurts even as I type this), and the only cure is resting it while I can. It has a couple of good hours of walking around in it before it starts killing me, so I build my daily plan around that. As one retired Canadian military officer I met on the trail told me, "We're aged." Ain't that the truth.

With all that said, the entire Wayfarer Expedition has been blown up. I simply cannot do the long-term hikes I wanted to, especially the ones that will require carrying camping gear, three days' worth of food and water, and roughing it up and down hills away from civilization. It was a sad, deflating, heartbreaking realisation that brought me to tears on the side of a Basque mountain a few days ago. I will still hike the Zagros Mountain Trail in Iraq and the Sahara trek in Morocco, but the Lycian Way, the Camino de Santiago in Chile, and the Estrada Real in Brazil are pretty much off. I have a lot of questions I need to answer that are still wholly unresolved, but that's a problem for another week, I think. For now, I'm going to enjoy at least some of the cities on my way to Santiago de Compostela.