After so many wonderful comments about the smiling faces in the pictures of the family on the Camino, I feel that I need to interject a bit of truth and reality. Spain is a mountainous country. Crisscrossed by mountain ranges that for centuries separated the provinces as well as the Moors and the Christians, Spanish towns are always located along some body lines of water. This means that when the pilgrims from all of Europe began to walk to Santiago, they would have to walk down hills to get to town and back up to get to the next one. This is what walking the Camino entails. It is as though there are no flat ground in Spain. So the smiling faces you see in the photos are covering up the sore muscles and annoying blisters. It is, however, a shared experience that has been and continues to be priceless.