Today I finished what turned out to be a thousand kilometer pilgrimage, across the Iberian peninsula, over a period of two months, and felt almost nothing.

I have had a lot of time, walking over mountains, through forests of oak and eucalyptus, and ancient cities, to picture the completion of my pilgrimage. This morning I wrote a blog post about the anticipation of my arrival, and reading it again, I sound delusional.

The walk to the End of the World was saturated with people, a few of them pilgrims. The parking lot was at its capacity of tour busses, and Danish teenagers flowed out and toward the cliffside like a river. I dreampt of a cool ocean spray in the air, but instead the thick musk of intercontinental shit wafted out of the public bathhouse. There was no beach in which to plunge myself to the ocean, but there were several bustling kiosks selling the same blue-and-yellow knick-knacks that infested every city like leprosy.

I clambered down the cliffside, seeking solitude from the clicking of cameras and the giggling of teenagers. I found a flat-ish boulder hanging over the ocean, sat down, and thought. I waited for tears to come, to be overehelmed by my journey’s end. There were no tears. I felt no different than I had the weeks before. An hour passed, and I scrambled back up to join the other tourists. I joined them in exhaling an enthusiastic “Wooooooowww”, and then turned my back to the End of the World, and descended back to Finisterra.

I thought of Forrest Gump and his three years of running across the North American continent. “When I got to another ocean, I figured, since I’d gone this far, I might as well just turn back, keep right on goin’.”

When I got to the ocean, I realized, or remembered, that it was never about getting to Santiago de Compostela, or Finisterra. It was about going somewhere. When I tell my family and eventually my children about el Camino, the stories won’t be about the day I finished. They will be about the people that I fell in love with along the way, the things that I saw and touched and felt.

Its easy to arrive somewhere, but it is a whole hell of a lot harder to go somewhere.