Buen Camino, Peregrino

I'm in a coffee shop in DC, so it's kind of hard to concentrate, but I'll try to keep this coherent. I was at a party on Saturday night and I started talking to this girl. She seemed perfectly nice, and we chatted for a while about the usual nonsense. After a few minutes we wandered away from each other and wound up on separate sides of the room talking to different people.

I was in the middle of a conversation with somebody when I hear this girl yell out "Oh my God! You walked El Camino??" I couldn't believe it. In three years of living in America I had met a total of ONE other person who had walked El Camino de Santiago.

I ran over to her and we started flipping out remembering different parts of the walk and some of the characters you meet along the way. She showed me the tattoo she got when she reached Santiago de Compostela and I told her what it was like to keep walking to Finisterra.

It was great because I don't get a chance to reminisce about El Camino that often. Some of the things she mentioned I had practically forgotten about. It was actually a bit sad, and it made me grateful that this time around I'll be travelling with Fiona. As you probably know, an experience you share with someone else is much harder to forget.

Anyway, we talked for a long time about El Camino and eventually the conversation shifted over to the Knights Templar (as it always does). I mentioned that I had just finished The DaVinci Code and I told her how I read it cover to cover in one day. I'm not sure how it came up, but at one point I said something about Opus Dei.

It turns out she went to an Opus Dei high school! I couldn't believe it. I thought Opus Dei was a fictional organization that Dan Brown made up! Not only is it real, but they actually do all that crazy stuff! They wear those cilice belts and everything.

For those who are as naive as I, Opus Dei is a SUPER conservative catholic group. Here's a snippet from the Opus Dei Awareness Network:

If you've got some time (I'm talking to you, Kenric), check out the ODAN page on corporal mortification:

As I'm sure you can imagine, I was pretty interested to hear what her high school experience was like. Needless to say, it was a lot different from mine.

We kept chatting for a while, mostly about her Opus Dei experience, and at one point I looked at her and I just started laughing. I couldn't help it. "I'm sorry," I said, "but you are just absolutely blowing my mind right now."

"You want me to really blow your mind?" she asked.
I just laughed. "Sure," I said.
"You're not going to believe this, but Robert Hanssen is my uncle."

I almost passed out.

"THE Robert Hanssen?? Like, the spy???"

She nodded. I was absolutely dumbstruck:

As I sit here typing this, I feel confident that this will go down as one of the most surreal conversations I will ever have. I'll never forget eating cheese dip with a former Opus Dei member who has walked The Way of St. James while she tells me about growing up four houses away from one of the most notorious spies in modern American history.

(Curiously enough, it turns out that Robert Hanssen was a member of Opus Dei as well, but that's all I'm going to say about that.)

Posted by flow Frazao on October 25, 2004 at 07:26 PM in Travel | Permalink