Another Night on the Camino

A kilometer, it turns out, is not a very good measure of a walk. It does not account for incline or decline, footing, stairs, wind, weather and unfortunately distance. On the Camino, one of the first things that you realize is that all distances are "as the bird flies" and do not take into consideration …

Camino de Santiago

I am amazed at how many different aspects there are to the allure of the Camino de Santiago trail in Spain. Many religious figures and celebrities have travelled this route, across the top of Spain, and been buried along the way  -- the religious figures, not the celebrities. In addition to that, it was once …

Via Francigena

The day that I lost my will to live, is one of my favourite Camino de Santiago stories. My feet were blistered, making walking painful, and every time that I entered a small town it was "closed". This is an admirable way of life, I mean the Spanish way, not the fact that I was …

The Juice of Life

While watching Ben Saunders describe walking across the frozen Arctic Ocean in a TED talk, I understood something I had not been able to articulate before. He likened his love of adventure to having a crack habit. He admitted that all of his money got sucked into his endeavors and that it had caused the …

Meseta

Pilgrims are dropping like flies. The stretch of the Camino that precedes Leon is a long straight path that runs beside the highway. The heat, sun and monotonous flatness is seen by some as meditative. The cold reality (or hot!) is that a couple of people have been hospitalized for heat stroke, many more have …