Jill Thomas is a Rambler, traveler, and storyteller with a big laugh who believes life takes her where she needs to go, no matter the roundabout path.
For many pilgrims, the Camino de Santiago begins long before they arrive in Spain. Physically, though, it often begins in Sarria—just over 100 kilometers from the finish line in Santiago de Compostela. That is where my first Camino began, and where I arrived to host the very first Sole Sister Ramblers travel adventure.
I’d been dreaming of walking a Camino for years, and having the opportunity to host this trip for Sole Sister Ramblers felt like an approachable way to finally do it. Embarking on the adventure with a guided tour—complete with luggage transfers, comfortable pre-booked hotels, and generous breakfast buffets—felt like the perfect way to ease into a Camino experience.
The route we would walk traverses the final 100 kilometers of the Camino Frances and is the most frequently walked section of all the Camino routes across Spain and Portugal. What many people don’t understand is that the Camino de Santiago isn’t a single path, but rather an extensive network of ancient pilgrimage routes traversing multiple countries throughout Europe.
Pilgrims have Rambled these paths for over a thousand years, often setting out from their front doorsteps—drawn by history, faith, curiosity, or an inexplicable inner pull toward Cathedral Square in Santiago de Compostela.
The Camino Frances is considered the most important and iconic of these routes—not because it is better than the others, but because of what it represents historically, culturally, and experientially. When people say they are “walking the Camino,” this is usually the route they mean. Kings, peasants, monks, merchants, and ordinary people from all walks of life have traveled this road, making the Camino Frances the historical backbone of the Camino tradition.
This route quite literally shaped Spain. Towns, bridges, monasteries, and churches were built centuries ago to support pilgrims, and those structures still define the landscape today. When you walk this route, you’re not just passing through ancient villages and historic churches—you’re walking through the reason these places exist at all. No other Camino route has influenced Spain’s physical, cultural, and economic development in quite the same way.
The Camino Frances also offers the most supportive pilgrimage ecosystem. It has the greatest number of albergues (Budget-friendly accommodation), cafes, bars, churches, and services, along with excellent waymarking and well-maintained trails.
It is also the route where the classic Camino rhythm is most strongly felt. Walking begins in the misty light of early morning, and after a few miles, pilgrims stop for coffee as the day warms—alongside a global community of others. The walking continues throughout the day, with both deep conversations and solitary thoughts unfolding over the miles, punctuated by stops for hearty Galician meals, cold beers in the late afternoon, and generous communal dinners at the end of the day.
While other Camino routes are quieter, the Frances offers the deeply communal experience many people associate with the Camino—shared meals, familiar faces reappearing day after day, and a natural rhythm of connection that forms as people walk, rest, and arrive together. It is also the cultural heartbeat of the Camino, traversing Roman roads, medieval villages, and some of Spain’s most magnificent Gothic cathedrals.
For those walking the entire Camino Frances, the journey begins in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port—about 780 kilometers (485 miles) from Santiago de Compostela. If you walk the full route, arriving in Sarria marks the beginning of the end, when the finish line finally starts to feel close.
For us—myself and the eleven other Sole Sisters who signed up for our very first Sole Sister Ramblers Camino adventure—Sarria was our starting point. It’s the most popular place to begin if you don’t have the time or desire to walk the entire route, because Sarria marks the minimum distance required to earn the Compostela, the official certificate of completion awarded in Santiago.
Getting to Sarria takes a bit of planning, as there’s no nearby international airport. I flew into Santiago de Compostela and joined a transfer van from there, arriving early with a plan: two nights in Santiago to sleep off the jet lag and give myself at least one full day to explore.
The only others on our trip who made the same choice were what I came to call “the British Contingent”—Sole Sisters from our Essex and Kent County Sole Circles—and we decided to meet the night before we were scheduled to travel to Sarria.
Despite being a self-avowed gregarious extrovert, I was ridiculously nervous about meeting them. Secretly, I’m almost always nervous when meeting new people. I wish there were a way to skip the awkward early part—when you’re assessing each other, deciding if you like one another—and fast-forward straight to the comfortable part.
This meeting carried extra weight because it was our very first Sole Sister Ramblers travel adventure, and it was also the first time I was meeting Sole Sisters outside my usual stomping grounds.
It was fun sharing a meal with my British Sole Sisters on the first night, and I couldn’t stop thinking that everyone at this table was here, doing this thing, because my good friends and I built this community. How crazy is that?
When I returned to my hotel, I was feeling equal parts excited and unsettled about the adventure ahead, and couldn’t sleep. That probably would have been true anyway: the old hotels in Santiago’s old quarter have thin walls, and in Santiago—like most towns in Spain—the party starts late and continues until morning. A street party raged below my window well past 4 a.m. while I ruminated on the fact that I had never once walked 25 kilometers in a single day — and now I was about to do it every day for a week.
The next morning, two Sole Sisters from the Essex Sole Circle discovered a local delicacy called Torta de Santiago—a traditional Galician almond cake that dates back to the Middle Ages. Following their walking guide’s suggestion, they entered a medieval nunnery through an ancient gate, rang a bell at a small window, and were handed a cake by a nun.
Later, six of us happily shared the dense, macaron-like almond cake in a sunny medieval square surrounded by breathtaking architecture, sipping cafe con leche and talking easily. Any social discomfort I felt the night before was now gone.
Soon, we were in a van on the way to Sarria, and we were giddy with excitement. We arrived in the late afternoon, Rambled through town in search of walking poles and other odds and ends for the days ahead, and then met up with the full group for our first communal dinner.
Our group included Canadians, Brits, and Americans, and all of us—except two sisters and two friends—arrived alone, meeting each other for the first time. For many, it was their first adventure of this kind.
During our welcome meeting, our guide told us, “You will be friends after this trip, and you will stay in touch. It always happens.” As the days passed, I learned how right he was. There is something beautifully intimate about walking with someone for hours and miles at a time. We later spoke about how quickly we became friends, quickly moving into a level of ease that would normally take months to develop.
We had connected virtually in a WhatsApp group nine months earlier, trained together in our Sole Sister Camino Training Challenge, agonized over what to pack, and built anticipation for so long that finally being together felt almost surreal.
The next day, we began our Camino with a 22-kilometer walk to Portomarín, a town that greets pilgrims with a dramatic climb up a long stone staircase after crossing the River Miño — an arrival that feels both physically demanding and quietly triumphant. When I collapsed onto the bed in my hotel room after our first full day of walking, I felt exhausted, relieved, and confident for the first time that I could do this.
The next day, conversations within our group quickly moved beyond small talk. I remember one moment when the women I was walking with began asking each other where our parents had been during World War II. Jennifer shared how her mother-in-law had been a refugee from Germany, sent to Great Britain on the Kindertransport just before the war broke out. She endured a difficult childhood, moving through foster care, but later in life, she spoke hundreds of times about her experience and what it came to mean.
The days passed both slowly and far too quickly, each following the same gentle rhythm of walking, chatting, deluxe coffees, delicious desserts, and lovely meals in trailside cafes. Our larger group naturally broke into ever-changing smaller groups, mixing and mingling throughout the day as we walked.
The weather was gorgeous for the first couple of days, and the green, undulating landscapes were beautiful—equal parts rural bucolic charm and ancient history. And then the rain came.
People say that you don’t truly experience the Camino unless you walk on rainy days. Well, we did experience the Camino in this regard. On the third afternoon, the rain poured down, accompanied by thunder, lightning, and hail the size of pebbles.
I was Rambling with three women from the Kent and Essex Sole Circles when the deluge began. We were content to walk slowly in the rain and were the last ones to arrive at our hotel that night, more than two hours behind the speedier Ramblers in our group who were determined to outrun the forecast.
The rain transformed the landscape. The greens became even more vibrant. Mist wrapped the tree-canopied paths, and I found myself daydreaming about renting one of the rustic trailside houses, writing stories, and walking these paths every day.
As we neared town, though, the joy gave way to cold. We were soaked to the bone. I couldn’t have been wetter if I’d fallen into a lake. Karen finally said, “Let’s speed up and get to the hotel to warm up,” and we did. We arrived sodden and were handed newspapers by the hotel clerk to stuff into our shoes to help speed the drying process.
That day, we all learned the value of a rain poncho. Many of us—including me—didn’t pack one. I assumed Spain would be hot and dry and didn’t believe I’d need a poncho. I was wrong. Northern Spain, where many of the Camino routes merge, is notoriously wet.
It rained on and off for the remaining days. After the first rainy day, Gill from the Essex, UK Sole Circle saved us by slipping out during dinner to buy several inexpensive plastic souvenir ponchos for those who needed them. Carolyn from the Napa, USA Sole Circle earned special recognition for her pre-trip research, arriving with the best poncho of all—complete with a zipper for ventilation and large front pockets for her phone and pilgrim passport.
There were many surprises on this trip for most of us.
One thing we all learned is that we agonized far more than necessary about packing. We learned that if you forget something, you can buy it along the way. Ponchos, especially, are sold everywhere—bars, coffee shops, and souvenir stores in all the towns.
I think most of us were also surprised by our ability to walk the distance. We talked about how walking felt surprisingly easy — maybe because we were wrapped in this happy, supportive bubble, with nothing else pulling at our attention. We found ourselves saying things like we “only” have eight miles left.
At one point, someone said that walking with Sole Sisters felt like being inside a supportive snow globe, and that really stayed with me. Later, I bought us all tiny, tacky Camino snow globes as a parting gift. As the days went on, we started wondering if something had shifted inside us — and whether long walks would still feel easier once we were home.
Several other things surprised me as well.
The beauty, for one. The landscape—the rustic homes, cobbled paths, babbling brooks, storybook forests, ancient stone fences, bars, restaurants, and albergues—was beyond anything I had imagined. Not all of it, of course. There are stretches along highways and through less appealing areas, but that’s part of the experience—and the beautiful moments are far more prevalent.
I wanted to walk those paths a million more times. And then there was the food—so good, affordable, healthy, and abundant. Our guide proudly boasted that the bread was the best in the world.
Speaking of our guide, Pedro, a 21-year-old man we all immediately adored, somehow fit perfectly into a group of women in midlife and beyond. He was wise and confident beyond his years, and yet most of us couldn’t resist mothering him.
What also surprised me was who we were as Ramblers. Except for one Rambler, whom we nicknamed Billy Goat Speed MacQueen, none of us were hardcore athletes. Many of us had only recently started walking regularly, and only a few had ever covered distances like this before.
Almost none of us completed the training challenge—which had taken place in a WhatsApp chat group created exclusively for Sole Sisters—and yet, somehow, there we were a week later, with 100+ kilometers behind us, standing on the finish line with no serious injuries, surprisingly few blisters, and a handful of new best friends. I don’t fully understand how it worked, but I’m calling it trail magic.
The feeling of crossing the finish line into Cathedral Square in Santiago de Compostela was the most surprising moment of all. I didn’t expect it to be so emotional, but I couldn’t hold back the tears that started flowing blocks before we even arrived.
Entering that ancient, sublimely beautiful square—serenaded by Galician bagpipes, accompanied by new friends, and overwhelmed with a profound sense of accomplishment—is a moment I will never forget.
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