Midlife Meanders

Why are you walking the Camino?

This is the question every “peregrino” is asked, and it will be asked over and over again.

It all started for us in 2012, when our son Stephen set out to walk the Pacific Crest Trail in the USA.  This trail starts at the Mexican border not far from San Diego, and is a continuous path through California, Oregon and Washington to the Canadian border some 2,650 miles away. For those of us who are metric, that is some 4,240 kilometres.  We started following his blog, and the blogs of those who were walking near him.  I became hooked by the idea, and said to Jane, “Let’s do it!”  Jane, being sensible, said “let’s try something shorter”.  She suggested the Camino. If our not-so-young bodies can manage, and if we are still talking to each other at the end, we can try something longer.

I was not convinced that the Camino was the thing for me.  Wild mountains and isolated places call me to adventure, and the thought of walking through villages and sharing bunk rooms with hundreds of sweaty pilgrims turned me off.  Then I spoke to some friends, Pete and Viv, who had recently walked a section, and I looked at their photos and I was intrigued.  It didn’t look too bad at all, and their photos were wonderful.  Pete even complained that being a talkative extrovert, there were not enough people for him to chat to each day!

We talked to others, and found many who had walked long or short stretches of the many Camino’s that end in Santiago de Compostela, and we were hooked.

Would this be a spiritual journey?  We were not setting out with this purpose, but we hoped it would be.  Our Anglican minister, Rob Taylor, who had walked part of the Camino with his wife Sue, encouraged us to become Catholics while we walked.

Our journey began in April 2015, and our record follows HERE.

This blog continues to record some of our walks, and we are about to set out again ….