Spain by Train

After our day in Santiago, we asked ourselves: “What’s next?”

Many pilgrims stay and spend several days in Santiago. Others travel to Finisterre, “the ends of the earth”, on foot or by bus or taxi to burn their boots and watch the sun go down over the ocean. But we had nowhere to stay in Santiago and had both already had our Finisterre experiences.

Our flight home is Tuesday out of Madrid, and neither of us has spent any time in this city, so we thought, why not go a few days early and see what the city has to offer?

“The only train available to Madrid on Saturday leaves at 8 a.m. and arrives in Madrid at 3 p.m.,” the woman at the ticket sales said. “All the other trains are full.”

We asked her for a few minutes to think about it. An 8 a.m. train meant getting up early and we hadn’t yet caught up from our all night walk. We could go to Finisterre after all, or look for beds in an Albergue early in the day on Saturday and stay another night in Santiago. But in the end we decided we would rather go to Madrid and enjoy the city.

“Two tickets for the 8 a.m. train to Madrid,” we told her.

She started typing in the information. “I’m sorry. That train is full,” she said. In just a few short minutes we had lost our way out of this town. I had taken the overnight bus last year and had vowed to never do that again. 

“What about Sunday?” I asked.

“It’s Semana Santa,” she said, typing and shaking her head ‘no’. There would be no going anywhere on Easter Sunday. She kept typing as we sat there, wondering what we were going to do.

Our friends that we had met in the woods had said they were going to walk to the airport after arriving in Santiago, but we didn’t have that kind of time.

“There is a train tomorrow at 10 a.m.,” she said. “But it goes through Leon and doesn’t arrive in Madrid until 9 p.m.”

“We’ll take it!” Rand said, before this train too was sold out.

As hard and long and exhausting as our walk into Santiago was, it seems like it all worked out for the best. We got the last hotel room in Santiago on Good Friday. And if we had waited to arrive on Saturday we might not have had a place to stay in Santiago or a way out of town to Madrid.  

After the best night sleep of the whole Camino, we walked a mile to the station and boarded our Saturday morning train. The first stretch would take us on a tour of our last two weeks of walking in reverse, from Santiago to Leon. The train didn’t follow the Camino exactly, but we were thrilled when we saw the occasional bridge, path, bar, and Albergue where we had stayed.

Shortly after boarding we received a text message from our friends from the woods, who said it had been a very cold night and thanked us for the hand warmers we had left them. While we had spent our time wondering if we would have been better off staying with them in the woods and walking to Santiago in the morning, they had been there thinking that they would have been better off walking with us. There's a lesson in that, I'm sure of it!

After changing trains in Leon, we followed new territory. The first couple of hours looked like Ohio with its flat farmland and abundance of animals. The latter stretch was through the mountains and forests and was equally as beautiful.

When we finally arrived in Madrid, we took a taxi from the train station to a hostel that had gotten wonderful reviews. Only to find it chained up tight. Our taxi driver looked apologetic, but it wasn’t his fault that it was closed. We assured him we would be alright and set off to walking amongst the streets packed with people, cars, bars, and more. After several unsuccessful attempts we finally landed at Hostal Sardinero. As the man checked us in he said, “Excuse me for a moment. I have to turn off our sign. You have the last room of the night.”

Once again we had found the one available room in town during “Semana Santa.” All seems to have worked out exactly right!