Two Camino Books by Sybille Yates

Taking the Camino Home: …because another Camino begins there!
by Sybille Yates
Independently published, 2025
75 pages (paperback, Kindle, and audiobook editions)
on Goodreads

Pilgrim Tips & Packing List – Camino de Santiago: What you need to know beforehand, what you need to take, and what you can leave at home.
by Sybille Yates with Daphne Hnatiuk, editor
Independently published, 2013   
140 pages (paperback, Kindle, and audiobook editions)
On Goodreads

Reviewed by Jerald Stroebele | Anchorage, AK

When I learned of Sybille Yates’s new book, Taking the Camino Home, I immediately ordered it. Why? Because her first book, Pilgrims Tips & Packing List, was one of the first Camino books I ever read. Too bad I didn’t read it until after our first family Camino on the del Norte. Had I read that gem of a book before my walk, my backpack could have been ten pounds lighter. I recently reread it for context as I read her latest book, Taking the Camino Home. After several Caminos, I can assure readers that Pilgrim Tips & Packing List remains one of the best books to understand what it is like to walk the Camino and to learn how to prepare for it. On my second reading, I still learned a lot.

Sybille Yates is a fluent English-speaking German woman who has walked many Caminos starting in 1999, and has served as an hospitalera in many albergues. She served as the volunteer lay coordinator for the Anglican Camino chaplaincy of the Church of England. She also is a regular responder on the Camino Forum where she generously offers specific advice to new and veteran pilgrims. She is a stellar example of Camino advocate and supporter; years ago she moved to Santiago de Compostela where she regularly meets with arriving pilgrims. In her small apartment she manages Egeria House, a free food bank for her neighbors and named for Egeria, a 4th-century woman who made a pilgrimage from Galicia to the Holy Land.

Taking the Camino Home is a thin volume packed with advice and gentle admonition on how to continue the sharing experiences of the albergues and the simple life of the Camino when you return home. Yates wrote the book to “show that we can live the Camino at home, that all those experiences are not limited to something we do in a far away country, but that we can and indeed need to experience them also at home.  . . . Be the pilgrim, not the bystander.” If even a small percentage of pilgrims would do a few of the person-friendly and Earth-friendly things Yates suggests, the world would be a much kinder place.

Both books are fun and easy to read. Yates addresses her reader in first person, down-to-earth dialogue. When reading, it is easy to think she is sitting across from you, café con leche in hand. Learn from these books. Enjoy them.

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