Re: Bringing a Child Question
JohnnieWalker said:
Last week I met a family with a less than 1 year old. They had adapted a baby seat inside a rucksack so the child could also enjoy the view whilst being carried!
You may be referring to us.
We would have been somewhere between León and O Cebreiro the week before you posted, an American couple with a little blond baby.
My then-girlfriend/now-fiancée and I walked the Camino with her one-year-old son, from Roncesvalles to Santiago, over about five weeks this June and July. While there were certainly challenges in taking the baby along, above and beyond what a typical peregrino would expect to face, we still managed to have an immensely rewarding experience, make friends, keep up with the pack, and generally have a good time -- and that goes for all three of us.
We had a few important factors going in our favor from from the beginning that made the trip (which included not just the Camino itself, but also trans-continental and trans-Atlantic flights and exceptionally long bus rides from and to Madrid at either end) much easier for us than it could have potentially been. The most significant of these was that the baby has a very easygoing, mild, gregarious temperament and was able to graciously tolerate things like the constant changes of scene as we went from albergue to albergue, the incessant and invariably loud attention of rural Spanish women over the age of 60 (especially in Galicia ... hmmm...), and having to spend several hours each day sleeping, sightseeing, or happily babbling to us while strapped into a backpack.
The second and third major factors had to do with how my fiancée had been raising the baby. For the baby's first year, he practically lived on my fiancée's back in an Ergo (
http://www.ergobabycarrier.com/), accompanying her when she walked to and from work, school, and everywhere else. He was thus extremely comfortable with being in a backpack for long periods of time (though only when it was actually
on somebody's back). You might want to consider using a lighter baby carrier like the Ergo to get a child used to being carried around that way before you take him or her on the Camino.
My fiancée had also practiced Elimination Communication (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elimination_communication) with the baby from the time he was a newborn, which meant that he rarely soiled his diaper along the trail (and if he did, it was usually our fault for misinterpreting or ignoring his signals that he had to go). This eliminated the need for us to carry large quantities of bulky disposable diapers; the two cloth ones we brought for him to wear on the trail (just to be safe) were usually sufficient to deal with any accidents.
Finally, we had in our favor the fact that human adults are naturally predisposed to find babies cute, and smiling, happy babies doubly so. The baby, far from being "not appreciated" by our fellow peregrinos, became kind of a mascot to the others in our cohort along the Camino. He would spend his afternoons and evenings exploring the albergues, playing with us and the other peregrinos (who were not above competing with each other for the baby's attention), and generally having a grand old time being everybody's friend. In fact, more people knew his name than ours: in one town, we accidentally followed an old, faded arrow onto a side street that the Camino had apparently been rerouted away from. Two Korean peregrinas behind us noticed that we had strayed from the correct path and, in order to call our attention to the matter, they shouted the baby's name; they couldn't recall either of ours. :lol:
As for equipment, we necessarily had to carry heavier than average loads. After all, we were packed for three and carrying one. My fiancée carried the majority of our stuff in a full-sized women's hiking backpack, while I carried the baby and some of our heavier-but-less-bulky items in a specialized, baby-carrier backpack made by Sherpani (a discontinued predecessor to
http://sherpani.us/product.aspx?bO3FscouH=1&GQd0EjaqX=6&pmdoXJC4W=149) that we picked up on clearance from REI -- though if I had it to do over again, I would have spent the extra money and bought a Deuter Kid Comfort II (
http://www.deuterusa.com/products/productDetail.php?packID=kidcomfortII&sub=family&tert=family). Our average pack load, child included, for me and my fiancée was somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 kilos apiece, and may have been as heavy as 17 kilos on a few occasions (Sundays in the deep countryside mainly) when we had to haul enough food to feed all three of us for the following day.
To help my occasionally-problematic ankles support the rather excessive weight, I walked the Camino in my heavy-duty, military-issue Corcoran jump boots (
http://www.uscav.com/Productinfo.aspx?productID=7615&TabID=1), which ended up performing stunningly well. Those parachute boots left my feet in much better condition at the end of the day than much lighter and springier shoes left the feet of many other peregrinos who were carrying lighter loads. I did have some painful but not catastrophic difficulties with my left knee for the last 120km or so, but I would blame sliding around on the the crumbly, slate-strewn hillside trails of western León and Galicia for that long before I would look to load or footwear. My fiancée, who has the constitution of a Sherpa, alternated between a pair of low-top hiking shoes and a pair of Teva sandals and walked the Camino with nary a problem.
Fortunately, we didn't need to carry heavy jars of baby food or anything like that; the baby was more than happy to eat what we were eating -- in fact, he insisted upon it. His beginner's set of teeth was able to handle tortillas, which he loved, and other soft foods with ease, and we would just chew or mash anything he couldn't handle on his own for him. His mother was also still nursing him; and so any nutritional deficiencies of the local diet; which in some areas seemed to consist solely of white bread, coffee, sugar, and ham; could be made up with breast milk.
Albergues were surprisingly tolerant of letting a baby spend the night; we were only given the "there's no room in the inn" treatment once, by an extremely agitated hospitalero who seemed convinced that a baby would somehow "contaminate" his refugio and refused us a place to sleep for the night, despite protests by other peregrinos who knew us that the child wouldn't be a problem (
here's looking at you, Refugio Tradicional de Castrojeriz). Oftentimes, we were even given special consideration at albergues, such as being assigned bunks somewhat separated from where the majority of the peregrinos were to sleep so that, if the baby woke up at night crying (which he did from time to time, usually because he had to pee), he wouldn't disturb anyone else.
Even when we were thrown in with the main group, though, the ten or twenty seconds of the baby's crying before my fiancée or I could get up and rush him to the bathroom to take care of his problem was less disturbing to fellow peregrinos' sleep than the near-constant presence of multiple people whose snores could demolish entire city blocks if suitably concentrated, packaged, and deployed.
In the end, when we made it to Santiago, the Pilgrim's Office was nice enough to put the baby's name into an annotation on our Compostelas, so there's a record of him having done the Camino along with us (does riding on my back for 800km count as traveling to Santiago a caballo?).
We're not sure what sort, if any, of a lasting impression the trip has made on the baby, but he seemed to enjoy himself immensely while we were on the road in Spain. There's only one thing that's odd about him now that we can attribute directly to our walk on the Camino. He was starting language acquisition in earnest at the time we hopped on a plane to wing our way to Spain. Even though we're back in the California now, he still gets very insistent, for example, about wanting a drink of "ag'ga" and likes to call our attention to any four-legged "peh'oh" or "gah'oh" that happens to walk by. It seems that, while my fiancée and I brought home Compostelas and seashells for souvenirs of Spain, the baby brought home Spanish words.