Bought our tickets yesterday

pierrenaples said:

We are doing the Camino Frances from SJPP in mid September, we are planning to go to Mont Saint Michel and Lourdes a few days each first and then stay a few nights around SJPP before getting started. We are coming from SW Florida and departing from Miami and landing in Frankfurt Germany and then on to Pamplona for a day or two.

We found for us the prices were starting to climb possibly due to the war in Ukraine effecting fuel costs. It was surprising that in two weeks they went up $65 each for the first leg. We chose Frankfurt because we may skip the second flight to Pamplona and see friends nearby.

The other thing that surprised us was that in Google Flights putting Miami as our starting point and putting Pamplona as our destination the price one way was $300 each, it goes nonstop to Frankfurt has a 3 hour layover between flights to Pamplona. If we asked for Frankfurt as the destination it would go thru Lisbon and be more by roughly $50 each. The same was true with Paris or Madrid.

We are leaving the return fight open until we see how we are doing along the Camino, we plan on doing the Finisterre and then travel to Fatima and depart from Lisbon. If we have extra days may do a few days in Barcelona too. We can’t wait and are diligently training with our foot ware and loaded packs with increasing length and weight carried. So far so good, we haven’t tried walking in the rain yet but that’s coming too.

Buen Camino.

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Charles Ross said:

I'm a bit surprised that travel prices would be going up. I would think, if anything travelers would be changing their plans given the crisis. If you don't mind some advice: Re: Lourdes. We are going there in April; mainly because it is an easy flight from Dublin and an easy train ride to SJPdP. We were going to spend a night or two there but a friend who has spent some time there said 'skip it'. The only value he said was seeing the amazing number of stores there selling 'plastic Mary statues made in China'. If you intend also to visit Fatima you probably attach a deeper religious meaning to this visit than I, so there's that! Re: pack weight. In 2018 I hauled a cooking stove and fuel across the Camino Frances; never used it. my pack only weighed 23-24 pounds but it was 7-8 pounds too much! We start in in SJPdP on April 12th or so. I'm going to have about 15 pounds: Sleeping bag, 4-5 pairs of socks, underwear, long pants and a couple of tee shirts and long shirts, and the 'Moon' CdS book by Beebe Bahrami. We saw, in 2018, people with 40 + liter packs, full and also front packs! They looked really, really stressed. We are in our 70's and not terribly fit. We gave ourselves 30 days to walk from Pamplona to Santiago and were only able to do about 40% of the walk. We can walk 25 km in a day but we can't do it every day! This time we are giving it 50 days total and if we can't do the entire 780 km, fine. We would probably skip the last 100 km as it is reputed to be a bit of a circus anyway. Re: reservations. We did not make any and did just fine walking in May. The availability of food and lodging along the Way is just amazing. I think what helped is that we were not on a 'program'. If we started walking at 9:00 and came across a beautiful place in a few hours, we stopped and stayed. Overall, it was one of the most enjoyable, interesting, low stress travel experiences I've ever had. I could go on, but I'll end it here. Buen Camino.

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