This was indeed a leap of faith. My daughters had never done anything like this, walking with backpacks into totally unfamiliar country, and I was pretty arrogant, thinking we’d just be fine. We were fine – of course we would be fine – but thinking back on the way we planned each of our stages […]
Category: Camino Frances
Portomarín to Palas de Rei (2010)
And then I got lost leaving Portomarín. I thought the Camino went up the hill past the church when it actually continues off to the left after you cross that bridge before you climb into town. I learned to find out where I am on the planet before moving, otherwise you move in the wrong […]
NYC to Roncesvalles (2014)
The plan was fairly simple: we would fly from our Thanksgiving visit with my family in Chicago to New York, spend a few hours exchanging our wheelie bags for our backpacks, and then head out to the airport to fly to Madrid. My daughter and I arrived in Newark in the morning and had just […]
NYC to León (2012)
I always think it’s in the starting that a journey takes its shape. How have I come to this point of departure and how did I decide this was the time I needed to travel? How did I get to a place where a 300 km hike in the month of December seemed like the […]
Sarria to Portomarín (2010)
I’m really not sure what I was thinking. December 27, 2010 and I take off like I know what I’m doing and I walk right out of town, right into the countryside – alone. How I became this reckless, this fearless, this full-on crazy different from my normal indoor self, I will never know. But […]
New York City to Sarria (2010)
2010 was, in the language of pilgrims, a Holy Year. They don’t come around all that often and when they do, the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela greets many thousands more visitors than in an ordinary year. I had read about holy years for some time and thought it was really nice to have a […]
St. Jean Pied de Port to Roncesvalles (2009)
One thing I can tell you about walking the first stage of the Camino, typically the route through the Pyrenees from France into Spain, is this: it’s just really not all that easy. You leave the sweet village of St. Jean Pied de Port and start climbing into the mountains and before you know […]
Paris to St. Jean Pied de Port (2009)
In late May of 2009, I flew to Paris with my son on a mission to explore a number of pilgrimage sites I had studied in college. We visited the Tour St. Jacques which had just recently been restored. It was more a symbolic gesture than anything substantive because we were not going to walk […]
Tumbleweed Pilgrim 