Credentials

[Ted Kayes]

During our peregrination on the Camino this summer we used the Friends
passports that Linda provided.
Nearly all of the peregrinos use passports that merely have blocks in which
to put the sellos (stamps).
The Friends' has printed in it all of the major cities and pueblos on the
Camino from SJPP in the order that they are encountered.  It makes it easy
to recall where a sello was obtained and was admired by many other pilgrims.

Regarding the two stamps a day requirement.  My wife made it a practice to
get a sello at every open albergue that we passed.  A couple of days we did
not get a second sello.  When we got to Santiago, they really did not care
that there were two stamps per day.  They looked at the passport, its
stamps and the dates and were confident that we had walked the
route.  Nearly every bar on the Camino has a sello.  Its easy to get
multiple stamps.

We twice saw people get out of cars and walk into an albergue, get a
passport stamped and then go back out to the car and drive away.  So there
apparently are people who cheat.

Generally our fellow peregrinos were courteous, queued in the order of
arrival when necessary and were polite.  We saw only one race to an albergue.
When we were about 2km from Triacastela (a great place to eat, a number of
good restaurants) there were a group of 7 or 8 Frenchmen behind us.  One of
them started jogging with a handful of passports and passed us and three
other pairs of peregrinos in order to get in line at the albergue before us.