Travel report from Sebastian Bär

It will soon be 10 years since I set out walking from St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. On my feet I was wearing one of the first models of our “Treviso” hiking boot and I was overjoyed to be one of the only pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago not to be suffering from blisters or aching feet every morning.

Since then, we have received numerous letters, postcards and pictures from customers telling (or showing) us how they undertook a pilgrimage on the famous Road to Santiago, with their “Treviso”, “Canyon”, “Nomad” or other BÄR shoes. With every one of their letters, my heart leaps because a pilgrimage on the Camino is a very special adventure!

Sometimes you are in luck and you don’t have to share your night’s lodgings with very many other pilgrims. For the most part, however, you only manage to find a makeshift bed in a converted stable or a small hall with 20, 30 or even more pilgrims. So in pilgrim hostels, the amount of noise means you rarely get a good night’s sleep. With tired eyes and faces twisted with pain, numerous men and women suffer the agony of pulling on their hiking boots having already smothered their feet in talc or cream in the hope of surviving that day’s leg of the journey without sustaining any further injury.BÄR’s “Treviso” spared me these unpleasant experiences and helped put me in a cheerful frame of mind from the moment I got out of bed to the end of the day. For all that, an expedition doesn’t always go perfectly to plan: you can get lost because you missed one of the yellow arrows showing the way, or there is no accommodation left when you reach the end of the day’s trek, so that your only option is to spend the night in overcrowded makeshift lodgings. Sometimes it rains all day or the heat is so oppressive that you find yourself longing for a shady spot. In retrospect, all these incidents – both positive and less positive – blur together as the “Road to Santiago” experience. The encounters and resulting discussions and friendships are both formative and unforgettable. At the time, it seemed to me as if time had stood still – it was simply no longer relevant. I remember it with a great feeling of nostalgia.

That was hardly the case when I finally found myself standing in front of the cathedral in Santiago: I had arrived and I slowly realised that I didn’t need to walk any further. I certainly felt glad, but more important was the uplifting realisation that I had achieved something, that my goal was the road and not – as I thought at the outset – the arrival. You can look forward to tackling iconic roads and life-affirming adventures without any problems in BÄR shoes. We promise you that things will go well for you in our shoes!

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Sebastian Bär