Andrew McCarthy · 2023 · road

Andrew McCarthy's 2023 memoir. Twenty-five years after walking the Camino de Santiago alone, he walks it again with his nineteen-year-old son Sam, five hundred miles in thirty-two days. On the second morning Sam asks what the point of this effing walk is, and the book is the rest of the answer.

1. 1
   Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port

   The start on the French side of the Pyrenees, where pilgrims collect a credential and a shell - a father who has done this before and a son who has agreed to it after a breakup and is already regretting it.

2. 2
   Roncesvalles

   The first day is the hardest of the whole route, over the pass into Spain - and the pattern of the book sets in at once: hours of walking, very little said, and then something said that could not have been said at home.

3. 3
   Pamplona

   Down out of the mountains into the first city, the bull-running streets full of people who are not walking anywhere - and two Americans passing through it on foot, already keeping different company than tourists.

4. 4
   Burgos

   The cathedral city at the edge of the meseta, where the guidebooks warn you that the next stretch is the one people quit on - flat wheat country with nothing in it, for days.

5. 5
   The meseta

   The tableland to Leon, where McCarthy broke down sobbing on his first Camino twenty-five years earlier and found the fear had gone out of him - and where he watches to see what it will do to his son.

6. 6
   O Cebreiro

   The climb into Galicia and the round stone huts on the ridge, with the weather changing and the last hundred miles ahead - by now the two of them walking as company rather than as a father and a boy.

7. 7
   Santiago de Compostela

   The cathedral, the botafumeiro and the end of the pilgrimage after thirty-two days - and the odd flatness pilgrims report on arriving, having spent a month getting good at not arriving.

8. 8
   Finisterre

   Sam walks two days further, out to the cape the Romans thought was the end of the world, and his father lets him go on ahead - which is where McCarthy says he knew there was a book in it.