22

MARTIN

Another pleasant day’s walk, under blue Italian skies. And the occasional shout of Buon Cammino. Pilgrims might be scarce on this path, but they were recognised.

We arrived in Trana, a pretty town on a river, tucked in among surrounding hills, to be ambushed by a middle-aged woman who offered accommodation—for all six of us. It seemed she was the local pilgrim-welcomer and must have stationed herself on the route for mid-afternoon arrivals. If we hadn’t already made arrangements, I would have been tempted to accept: Zoe and I were missing the connection with other walkers, and staying in dedicated accommodation might have given us something of that sense.

‘Trana is really nice,’ said Zoe, for some reason sounding surprised.

‘Do you see many pilgrims?’ I asked our lady and got the answer we’d come to expect.

‘One or two a week, sometimes alone, sometimes couples, in the high season. I don’t wait for them in the low season, but they call on the telephone.’

‘How do they cross the mountains in the low season?’ said Gilbert.

‘They don’t. They are doing it in stages, so they are starting perhaps in Susa, at the border.’

We were led into a small annex of the church, where our credentials were duly stamped. Camille and Zoe lit candles.

‘Where are we staying?’ asked Sarah. I gave her the name of our hotel and she punched it into her navigation app. ‘Race you,’ she said to Bernhard.

They were off and running awkwardly with the weight of their packs and had disappeared across a shaky wooden footbridge before I could elaborate.

‘Almost there,’ said Zoe to Camille, and Gilbert and I exchanged glances.

‘Just a mile or two,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘We pushed it out to bank a bit for tomorrow.’ We’d taken a recommendation from our previous night’s B&B host. ‘It’s on the route—more or less—and apparently much nicer than Trana.’

It, when we arrived an hour later, sat alone on the main road and appeared to cater for itinerant workers rather than tourists. Gilbert spotted that the hotel’s proprietor shared a surname with our previous night’s host, and we established that she was his sister-in-law.

But there was a restaurant, with a canteen ambience, and a swimming pool. That had been a selling point. Eternally upbeat, Gilbert suggested we meet beside it for pre-dinner drinks.

The weather was fine, and he secured a bottle of Italian white, but not much else fitted the picture of ‘Drinks by the pool in Northern Italy.’ The pool was empty and we had to bring our own chairs from the dining room.

Then Sarah and Bernhard appeared, both in shorts. They’d had time to recover, but Bernhard was hobbling.

‘Dad! It was four point three kilometres. You said we were stopping in Trana…’

‘And how long did it take before you realised you had that far to run?’

‘About thirty seconds.’

‘So, you could have stopped. But you didn’t.’

Actually, I was feeling a bit chuffed. She might be directionless in life, but she’d found the motivation to run four kilometres with a backpack.

‘Who won?’ I said.

Bernhard pointed to Sarah and I felt doubly chuffed.

Then he lay on his stomach on the small patch of grass, and Sarah set to work massaging his calves. And his thighs.

I turned to Zoe. ‘This is your territory, isn’t it?’ She had financed her first camino with massages for weary walkers.

‘You want me to massage Bernhard?’

‘Well, if he’s got an injury—a muscle strain…fair enough… save it for later.’