Exclusively yours, here's a sneak peek into the daily life of a peregrino (pilgrim) on the Camino de Santiago across Northern Spain:
4:45 a.m. Wake up. Clamber down in pitch-black darkness from your inevitable upper bunk and stumble to the bathroom, tripping over backpacks.
4:47 a.m. The bathroom will be out of toilet paper.
5:30 a.m. If you're lucky, the albergue will have left out tostadas, bread with jam and margarine accompanied by coffee, hot milk and hot chocolate. If not, you will eat a stale and sickly sweet packaged chocolate croissant from the vending machine.
5:45 a.m. Remember you forgot to apply moleskin to your blisters. Do it, even though you have to take off your boots. DO IT.
6 a.m. Walk, following the yellow arrows and sea shells posted on signs or grafittied on walls. I've never been more thankful for public vandalism.
8:45 a.m. Stop at a bar for café con leche.
9:27 a.m. Find a large cluster of bushes—coffee is a diuretic. Hope you didn't moon the pilgrims that just passed by.
2:00 p.m. After doing snack-walk-pee-repeat cycles for 25km, arrive in another quaint (read: cobblestoned and crumbling) Spanish hamlet whose name you will forget tomorrow.
2:15 p.m. Check in at the albergue. Shower. Emerge a cleansed and enlightened being. While scrubbing your clothes by hand, remember how you spent the last 8 hours abusing your body.
2:45 p.m. Go local and take a siesta. Or go to a bar and eat ice cream.
5:30 p.m. If there's a kitchen, save money and use it. Otherwise go back to the bar and get the pilgrim's menu. Eat more ice cream because calories don't count on the Camino.
7:45 p.m. Talk to other pilgrims, wait for pilgrim's mass, or assert your pilgrim privileges and lull yourself the sleep to the sound of your hairy Polish bunkmate's snoring.
That's right, folks: All this and more can be yours for only five weeks and a healthy sense of masochism!