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Article in the NYT about walking and Camino

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You beat me to it. There are SO many thoughts expressed there (by the author and in the people he quotes, from Bill Bryson to Rousseau to Nietzche and more!) that are just spot on.

I know that in the past some forum members haven’t been able to get past the paywall, so here is my attempt to “gift” the article to you.

 
You beat me to it. There are SO many thoughts expressed there (by the author and in the people he quotes, from Bill Bryson to Rousseau to Nietzche and more!) that are just spot on.

I know that in the past some forum members haven’t been able to get past the paywall, so here is my attempt to “gift” the article to you.

thanks! I should have thought of that...
 
St James' Way - Self-guided 4-7 day Walking Packages, Reading to Southampton, 110 kms
"Spring has sprung. Lace up."
Wonderful article on the joys of walking. I have never had a driver's license, so I have spent my life walking (or being chauffeured about by friends, partners and strangers). People frequently tell me that I can't walk to X, because it's too far, but X is only 2km away, or that I need a car to live in my very urban sprawl, car centric, winter for 8 months of the year city. Phbbbttttttt!

I will walk. I walk when I need to pick something up at the store. I walk when I want to phone someone. I walk my dog several times a day. I walk when I'm bored, annoyed or sad. I walk when I'm happy, curious, or excited. I love walking.

Today it is grey and -3C but I noticed yesterday when I walked to pick up groceries that the sidewalks are no longer dangerous icefields, so I will be pulling out my gear and testing my new shoes and taking a chilly walk to blow the lazy winter off of me.
Edit: I made breakfast, found my gear eventually, layered it all on, got downstairs and it has snowed. I'm sulking on the sofa instead of walking.

I loved the quote from WH Davies so I looked up the poem.

The Best Friend​

by William Henry Davies
Now shall I walk
Or shall I ride?
"Ride", Pleasure said;
"Walk", Joy replied.

Now what shall I --
Stay home or roam?
"Roam", Pleasure said;
And Joy -- "stay home."

Now shall I dance,
Or sit for dreams?
"Sit," answers Joy;
"Dance," Pleasure screams.

Which of ye two
Will kindest be?
Pleasure laughed sweet,
But Joy kissed me.
 
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The focus is on reducing the risk of failure through being well prepared. 2nd ed.
You beat me to it. There are SO many thoughts expressed there (by the author and in the people he quotes, from Bill Bryson to Rousseau to Nietzche and more!) that are just spot on.

I know that in the past some forum members haven’t been able to get past the paywall, so here is my attempt to “gift” the article to you.

As always, you are so kind and thoughtful. I was able to read and enjoy it. Thank you!
 
This article appears at just the right moment, so apropos, it feels like the universe is aligned with my walk, leaving in less than 2 weeks for my first Camino. Maybe others of you making your own preparations for your 2023 walks feel the same way? Is the universe calling you?

Some beautiful quotes to ponder, and share with friends (who either wonder why I'm going, or are jealous - in a friendly way! - they are not going themselves).

I like to say that if you are not hearing the birds singing on your walk, your brain is not walking with you, it is wandering someplace else. Of course birds aren't always singing, but you get the idea.

I like to feel present during walks, use walks to let go of the thoughts bumping around my brain, and listening to nature (birds and otherwise) is a great way to give your brain a rest and enjoy the world. A mini vacation for the soul (when you're not walking the Camino for a longer vacation!). Not judging those who want to listen to music (earbuds, please!) or otherwise. For me, it's a way to let go of everything, after the first mile or so I can shut off the thoughts and just enjoy the pleasure of movement and feeling the world around me
 
You beat me to it. There are SO many thoughts expressed there (by the author and in the people he quotes, from Bill Bryson to Rousseau to Nietzche and more!) that are just spot on.

I know that in the past some forum members haven’t been able to get past the paywall, so here is my attempt to “gift” the article to you.

I just gifted it to two of my friends also!
 
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You beat me to it. There are SO many thoughts expressed there (by the author and in the people he quotes, from Bill Bryson to Rousseau to Nietzche and more!) that are just spot on.

I know that in the past some forum members haven’t been able to get past the paywall, so here is my attempt to “gift” the article to you.

Thank you very much.
 
You beat me to it. There are SO many thoughts expressed there (by the author and in the people he quotes, from Bill Bryson to Rousseau to Nietzche and more!) that are just spot on.

I know that in the past some forum members haven’t been able to get past the paywall, so here is my attempt to “gift” the article to you.

Thank you so much. I had tried to access this article and couldn't because I'm not subscriber. Yes, from my experience, spot on!
 
You beat me to it. There are SO many thoughts expressed there (by the author and in the people he quotes, from Bill Bryson to Rousseau to Nietzche and more!) that are just spot on.

I know that in the past some forum members haven’t been able to get past the paywall, so here is my attempt to “gift” the article to you.

Thank you!!
 
St James' Way - Self-guided 4-7 day Walking Packages, Reading to Southampton, 110 kms
You beat me to it. There are SO many thoughts expressed there (by the author and in the people he quotes, from Bill Bryson to Rousseau to Nietzche and more!) that are just spot on.

I know that in the past some forum members haven’t been able to get past the paywall, so here is my attempt to “gift” the article to you.

It worked! Thanks
 
"And through such physical communion, walking offers up its crowning gift by bringing us emotionally, even spiritually, home to ourselves." AMEN

Thank you Laurie for the link.
 
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I stumbled upon the NYT essay as well. It totally resonated with me as I'm turning 60 and will be hiking the Camino Frances with my 19 year old son this summer. Serendipity at its finest. :)
How wonderful that you will be walking with your son. I have read other travel stories by Andrew McCarthy so I followed his instagram posts when he walked the Frances with his son Sam. From memory, he posted just one evocative photo each day, usually with a brief description about the 'topic' they had discussed that day, about their lives and the world around them. I found it enchanting.

Best wishes for your upcoming adventure.

And thank you for the links @kelleymac and @peregrina2000
 
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A selection of Camino Jewellery
You beat me to it. There are SO many thoughts expressed there (by the author and in the people he quotes, from Bill Bryson to Rousseau to Nietzche and more!) that are just spot on.

I know that in the past some forum members haven’t been able to get past the paywall, so here is my attempt to “gift” the article to you.

It worked! Thankyou so much! Funny, I said to my brother: it’s the best thing I’ve done! Just like the son in the article. 🙏
 
You beat me to it. There are SO many thoughts expressed there (by the author and in the people he quotes, from Bill Bryson to Rousseau to Nietzche and more!) that are just spot on.

I know that in the past some forum members haven’t been able to get past the paywall, so here is my attempt to “gift” the article to you.

Thanks for the gift Laurie - great read. I’m back to the Frances in Sept with MY son & daughter-in-law. Hope they give it 10 out of 10!
 
You beat me to it. There are SO many thoughts expressed there (by the author and in the people he quotes, from Bill Bryson to Rousseau to Nietzche and more!) that are just spot on.

I know that in the past some forum members haven’t been able to get past the paywall, so here is my attempt to “gift” the article to you.

Thank you for sharing @peregrina2000
A lovely article and so true
 
The one from Galicia (the round) and the one from Castilla & Leon. Individually numbered and made by the same people that make the ones you see on your walk.
Not a bad NYT column; I know he hit many of the feelings I get from walking. He also has a book about the camino ( “Walking with Sam:....”) , which I have not read, or the reviews, but given the 5/9/23 release date, this column is probably partially cross marketing. , https://www.amazon.com/Walking-Sam-Father-Hundred-Across/dp/1538709201?tag=casaivar02-20
Note he is a Hollywood b??-lister. And considered a member of the Brat Pack (led by Emilio Estevez, the director of “The Way”)
Ok, enough of “the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” as applied to the Camino.
I await eagerly the book review to see if I wish another Camino read. Last was "Great Westward Walk" which I dearly loved the perspective.
 
Not discussed in the NYT article is a very important concept that very much applies to the Camino. "New research from the University of Hong Kong shows that walking side by side helps people connect to each other. This effect is so powerful that it works on people who've never met before, even while they aren't speaking to each other. And it happens in less than five minutes."

 
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Another book I will have to read!

I spent a couple of minutes chatting with Andrew McCarthy after he spoke at a travel show in Washington DC in 2019...nice guy...

I think the article attached below has some good excerpts abouts the lessons learned on his first Camino, and although most of us are neither actors or authors, I think a lot of us can identify with what he felt and described....If there is any doubt he is the handsome guy on the right....


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How can anyone look "handsome" next to one of icons of the 80's bratpack era? ;-)
 
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You beat me to it. There are SO many thoughts expressed there (by the author and in the people he quotes, from Bill Bryson to Rousseau to Nietzche and more!) that are just spot on.

I know that in the past some forum members haven’t been able to get past the paywall, so here is my attempt to “gift” the article to you.

For those who don't subscribe to the Washington Post, the article today about a walk from Washington to New York describes the experiences we often get on a camino. I paused for a good while reflecting on this final words: "There are great wonders out there for anyone who decides to go look at the world at three miles an hour. The speed of love, as one philosopher wrote."

What I learned about America at 3 miles per hour​


By Neil King Jr.
March 29, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT



Neil King Jr. is a former Wall Street Journal reporter and editor and the author of the forthcoming “American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal.”
We’re told not to sweat the small stuff, and that’s good advice. I’d go further and say we should celebrate it.
I took a long walk one spring morning with the express goal of simply paying attention to what I saw and heard. I was working on a hunch — that over the past decade, our gadgets and our penchant for speed and the piling on of distractions have diminished our capacity for wonder, awe and kindness.

So I walked out my door a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol, took a left past the gate and lit out for New York City — a slow stroll up a fast corridor.
I didn’t go to notch some great physical achievement. My meandering, 330-mile saunter along the edges of roads and highways was all about paying homage to the land in between and to what it could tell me, step by step, over 26 days.
This walk through a founding swath of the nation came at a time when the country was plainly out of sorts. We were fighting over statues, over which of our national dead to honor and which to cast aside. We were fighting over our origins and the stories we tell our children about our past. We were fighting over an election and whether we hold any truths to be self-evident.
All that was grist for the walk, but my paramount aim was to devote myself to simple things. Which of the fruit trees blossomed first. Why the maples might have flowered on a hillside but not in the valley. The first flash of an osprey overhead. How the earliest settlers built first with wood, then with fieldstone and later, if lucky, with squared-off blocks quarried from the earth.

I stopped to examine the handmade hinges of barns along the Mason-Dixon Line. I studied how the farms changed and got prouder once you crossed the Susquehanna River. I counted the micronations passed along the way, each still defined by the imprints of its earliest settlers.

I am not pretending that a long walk will cure us of our personal or national woes. But I can attest to deep astonishment, as the weeks and miles ticked by, at how the quiet attentiveness of those days cleansed my eyes and opened my spirit. How they changed me and created a space I can step into even now.
There is nothing new in this. Noticing and honoring the particulars — the details we’ve grown so good at missing as we stare at our screens — lies at the heart of most great science and art — and so much of religion, too. What would Charles Darwin be without his finches, or Galileo his tiny stars in the shadow of Jupiter? “Attention,” the poet Mary Oliver said, “is the beginning of devotion.” She paid attention, like all great poets.
Our country’s history is best seen on foot, in its gritty specifics, day after day, in the contours of the canals and railways and cemeteries we have built going back to our earliest years. A walker can examine our past and present up close and come to some hazy conclusion over where we might be heading, not unlike Alexis de Tocqueville and Charles Dickens and so many others did when wandering similar byways during another uneasy patch of our history.
You get a deeper understanding, walking the small roads, for the back-and-forth wash of memory and oblivion. The Indigenous villages on the colonial maps where not a physical trace remains. The sunken graves to forgotten luminaries in the all-Black cemeteries. The rail beds in northern Maryland where proslavery forces bombed the bridges in the days after the Battle of Fort Sumter. The once-proud manor houses gone to seed and the one where 10 generations have kept their stone home perfectly neat. You see up close how quickly the earth can take back even the most solid efforts to memorialize.
You see, too, the fickleness of whom we honor or neglect. In the tidy Pennsylvania town of Lancaster, I wandered the meticulously kept home of President James Buchanan, the antebellum Southern sympathizer who reviled abolitionists. And I visited the hulk of a townhouse once owned by his nemesis, Rep. Thaddeus Stevens, the radical lawmaker who did as much as anyone to codify the end of slavery in the Constitution. His home, only now, is becoming a place to visit and revere.
We fight over the Founding Fathers, but on a long walk your respect deepens for those other founders, the anonymous ones — some enslaved, others barely scraping by — who cleared the forests and dug the canals and blasted the rock to lay the rails. Who built the elaborate stone walls to divide the meadows now taken back by forest. Hundreds of ragged laborers died of cholera when digging the canals that skirt the Delaware. Their bones are buried there still.
The thing about these details is they round out us humans, too. We all have our attributes that help forgive our faults. We have our many facets. If you come to know just the objectionable ones from afar, you’re missing the whole person. We do a lot of that now with the flattened people we fume about on television and Twitter.


Along the walk, I met many people, some faintly like me and many not. We stood and talked alongside their tractor or inside their barn or at the end of their driveway, and even those who held views contrary to mine had things about them I found endearing.
There was the bearded auctioneer in Pennsylvania who said God no longer loved America for all the ways we were sinning, but then beamed when showing off the vintage tractors he would sell at auction in the morning; my phone had died, and he gave me good directions to get to where I was going. Or the drywaller in New Jersey with the MAGA flags fluttering from his pickup who lavished me with snacks and jokes when he heard what I was doing; as we talked in his driveway, he gave me a cold beer.
Encountering people on a common patch of ground makes a real difference. Day after day, I had to size people up, and they me, to figure out what we made of each other. This encounter is both more complex and more satisfying as a pedestrian, especially a wayfaring one with a pack on his back. You begin quickly to hone your skills at belonging in the odd places where you arrive — the airless roadside tavern, the Mennonite butcher shop, the tennis court where I persuaded a stranger to lend me a racket and play.
No, you don’t have to walk for weeks on end to glimpse what I’m talking about. Study a route, immerse yourself in its history, its geography, the lay of the land and how it got that way, and go walk it attentively, if only for a couple of days.
When you do so, you may see how the effort can renew the spirit and unleash fresh reserves of awe. I had moments of rapture that boiled out of nowhere — in a tavern as rain poured outside, along a road as a slanting snow blew, on the Bayonne Bridge when I caught my first silvery flash of Lower Manhattan. The days and all those miles had pried open a part of the human spirit that magnified the potency of simple things and granted the commonplace a touch of the divine.
We can’t solve what ails us merely by meditating over what we see while walking over a few days or weeks. But we’ve been traveling at the speed we are now for less than two centuries. That is a tiny fraction of the 5,000 years or so since we began scribbling our collective stories.
A slow walk won’t buttress your certitudes — more likely the opposite, imbuing the mundane with wonder and magnifying the world’s extraordinary complexity. There are great wonders out there for anyone who decides to go look at the world, particularly a stretch you think you already know, at three miles an hour. The speed of love, as one philosopher wrote.
 
For those who don't subscribe to the Washington Post, the article today about a walk from Washington to New York describes the experiences we often get on a camino. I paused for a good while reflecting on this final words: "There are great wonders out there for anyone who decides to go look at the world at three miles an hour. The speed of love, as one philosopher wrote."

What I learned about America at 3 miles per hour​


By Neil King Jr.
March 29, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
This reminds me of another article from the Washington Post from 2020! An incredible path to walk, with details being worked on with historians and contemporaries today. Archived version below.

Why these women just walked Harriet Tubman’s 116-mile journey from the Underground Railroad​


“I think everyone comes into walking for individual reasons,” Johnston said. “There is some internal call in their lives that something needs to be changed.”

“The more we walked, the more vivid it became.”

“This is what I’m pledging to do for the rest of my life,” she said. “Just the simple act of putting one foot in front of the other can bring awareness to so many people.”

 
The focus is on reducing the risk of failure through being well prepared. 2nd ed.

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