Maybe There Will Be Cupcakes

Ginny Bartolone's Blog of Many Years

Category: Camino de Santiago

  • Coming Home Requires Patience

    Coming home requires patience. I’m three weeks out from my trip and I still find myself retreating into the solitary part of my mind that shielded me from a world of little red notification flags at the top of a screen. What’s odd is that I am having trouble recounting each hiking day in my…

  • My Heart is Still in Porto

    Marcie–the South Carolinan sitting to my right–held my hand during the entire, hair-raising, hour-and-fifteen-minute descent into Newark airport. She saw me panicking during our last bout of turbulence that sent even the flight attendants rushing to their jump seats, and gripped my hand without even looking up from her book. As life would have it,…

  • If “Acting is Doing” Then What is Everything Else?

    My acting teacher in London was never a huge fan of me. Though I like to believe I’m a rather agreeable human, I consistently clash with a very specific personality. We’re like two liquids that simply cannot occupy the same space. In one of our first classes, she asked us in a raspy tone, “What…

  • Well, I Just Booked a Ticket to Portugal

    Eleven years ago, I laid on my back across a bus seat on my way into Santiago de Compostela for the first time. As many of you know, I took a course about the Camino in college and spent three weeks flitting around Spain from the comfort of a coach bus with about 15 of…

  • Master of Two Worlds

    Muscle memory can sneak up on you. It’s been raining off and on all morning, so I headed out to my usual coffee shop with our big umbrella, tapping it on the ground as I walked. Halfway through my trip, I caught myself hitting the umbrella on the grass beside the sidewalk instead of the…

  • It’s More Fun to Believe in the Magic of Coincidence

      I’ve decided to make peace with living in emotional technicolor. Hear me out. I know that sounds like a bad hipster band name. But I’ve had a lot of coffee, so I’m rolling with it. Several months after my second Camino, I started having these wildly vivid dreams. The dreams themselves are pretty trippy.…

  • Why I Walk

    Pilgrim X is a nickname Claire and I gave a muscle-bound, chain-smoking hiker that we met on our Camino in 2009. She walked quickly, rarely stopped for lunch, and trekked ahead of the group with an angry, fevered gait of someone being chased. The last time we crossed her path, our current Camino family had…

  • A Note on Belonging

    I had a pretty difficult time returning from both of my Caminos. The noise of American televisions, the lack of connection with people in your neighborhood as you walk down the street, the speed of everyday life. The biggest shock driving home from the airport was the rigid geometry of the streets in our suburban…

  • Viana to Burgos: 6 days of hiking and a glimpse into my journal

    Been a bit of a crazy week over here, and unfortunately, that means my Camino writing has been swept aside in the busyness of it all. But it’s still on my mind, and I still want to share. The details may just have to wait until I really get things sorted out with what this…

  • Villatuerta to Los Arcos y Los Arcos to Viana

    I’m off on a trip for the weekend, so I’m gonna keep this short and leave it at a little Camino hindsight. Many people have asked me why I feel the need to return–and keep returning–to the same trail. With some so many other places, other trails even, to explore all over the world–why this…