One of my biggest lessons on the Camino was in planning. My friend and I arrived in Paris with no plan, or a very loose one that failed as soon as we looked at what time it was. We were going to just find a train upon arrival to reach the starting point in our pilgrimage: St. Jean Pied de Port. If there were no trains, we were going to find a cheap hostel. Our plane arrived around 8 PM. There goes the plan.

Paris is the most visited city in the world. We just figured the infrastructure for tourists would be obvious. Upon exiting the airport we realized that it’s far from obvious. We didn’t even know which train station we were looking for. There was no wifi around and figuring out all these things would be much more difficult as daylight slipped from us.

A man who spoke English noticed our obvious “lost-ness” and ended up being our angel of the night. He let us use his smart phone to look up which train station we needed to go to, how to get there, and what hostels were nearby. Turns out all the hostels we found were way out of our price range. Along the Camino- albergues were 10 euros, tops. Since we weren’t planning on staying in Paris, we didn’t realize how expensive they were. This was happening at a bus station, and when his bus arrived we just followed him on with no ticket and ended up taking that all the way to the train station.

We were pretty sure we were going to have to sleep in the station because there were no trains to St. Jean until morning. We had used the fifteen minutes of free wifi in the airport to email my mother’s spiritual guru, who lives in Paris, about our predicament, in hopes that he would check his email after 8 PM and get back to us. We thought that was a slim chance. We found wifi at that point and when I checked my email we were more than pleased to see he got back to us with his phone number.

We found our way to him and slept on his microscopic floor that night. The apartment was about the size of a small walk-in closet.  I am 5’2″ and I was curling my knees to fit both my friend and I in the available floor space for sleeping. In the morning, we said our goodbyes because he was leaving for Italy, and we thought we were leaving for St. Jean.

The morning train was full and so were all the trains for the next two days. We decided to just board the train without a ticket but were not able to figure out which one was going to our destination. We just couldn’t get out of Paris.

We ended up buying tickets for the next train to St. Jean. We just trusted we would find a place to stay for two nights even if that meant a park bench. We reached out to our one connection who was on his way to Italy. He said we couldn’t stay at his place but he had a friend who would be willing to house us. After finding our way to his friends house, we realized what a good situation we were in. She was our age and we really hit it off with her. She was very proud of her Mexican heritage, so we actually ended up going out with her friends that night to a salsa dancing concert. Also, she had more accommodating floor space.

We planned on spending a few hours in Paris and ended up spending 3 days there. This was a great start to our Camino, if we had thought ahead and planned we would have completely missed out on. In St. Jean, we ended up staying in this indescribably welcoming albergue. We met friends that night we will have for a lifetime, and ended up walking a large part of our Camino with. We would have completely missed out on those connections as well as the ones we made in Paris if we figured out everything ahead of time.

Cheers, to having no plans and sticking to them!

For a more full understanding of what the Camino de Santiago is, check out my first post.