Ex Camino Eagle - Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela

Arriving at Gatwick airport at shortly after 0200hrs on a Saturday (17th) morning with little more than a copy of the Joining instructions and my passport I embarked on the third iteration of Ex Camino Eagle.

What was Ex Camino Eagle? The mission in the JI’s was for personnel to develop individual spiritual, mental and physical resilience whilst also expanding personal awareness, develop emotional intelligence and interpersonal communication skills as well as an aid in recovery for service personnel, these are all key attributes for all ranks of all professions to attain and many are not necessarily developed outside of the force development (FD) environment, so Ex Camino Eagle seemed to be the best FD to attend to continue development of these attributes, plus it was in Spain!

How? We a group of 18 individuals from across all professions were to walk around 100km over 5 days of the Camino de Santiago ‘the way of St. James’; this would be the minimum distance required to qualify for the Camino Compostela - the Compostela is the original religious certificate written in Latin, expended by the Church when pilgrims prove they have either walked 100km or cycled (or travelled on horseback) 200km to Santiago de Compostela at the end of our journey. The Camino de Santiago is a large network of ancient pilgrim routes stretching across Europe and coming together at the tomb of St. James (Santiago in Spanish) in Santiago de Compostela in north-west Spain. Some of these routes even start in England but as we landed in Santiago and were bussed to Ourense, this would be the start of the pilgrimage for us. After our mandatory in brief from the DS and the Padres we were free to explore the local town as we would not start walking until the next day, many of us were unknown to each other but this was quickly rectified after some tapas and cerveza and like many situations in the military we quickly began to form friendships and bonds.

We began on Sunday the walk from Ourense to Cea, we initially set off in a group walking out of the town into the local area, no maps were required and we had to just follow the markers, safe to say all did not go to plan and quickly we were all