walkingtotheend
Member
- Time of past OR future Camino
- Camino Frances (2009) Le Puy (2018)
After completing our Camino (STPDP to SDC) in 2009 it has been with us every day. At the end we were sore, tired and spent. Our final 3 days at Santiago saw the circles become complete as we caught up at various stages with all our friends made along the way (some who had arrived before us and others that walked in after us). It all seemed to work. At that point we felt we would be unlikely to ever repeat the experience (it was a physically tough experience especially on my wife who suffers from back pain and her feet were constantly sore, blistered and nail less). She even threw her boots away at Santiago vowing to not walk anywhere again. Since then she has completed multiple wilderness walks and long distance bike rides.. I think she has worn out 2 more pairs of walking boots since 2009. The memories of pain disappear in time but the memory of the Camino, the country, the Spanish, the food, the alburgues, the smells and the pilgrims of all shapes, sizes, ages, cultures and their common attitudes are never forgotten Within days of our Camino finishing, the realisation of what we had just done and achieved started to hit home. I look back today almost 6 years later and still can't believe it. How did we do that? I am sure many pilgrims experience this 'after glow' and the Camino grows in their memories and starts to effect them in their future lives. It certainly changed us when within just 6 months of our return we had 'scaled' down. Selling our big house and moving to a small apartment in the city. And we certainly got rid of a lot of 'stuff'. All about the learning about what we carry each day and reducing the load of course. It probably took us about 3 months to switch from saying we could never do that again until we started to work out when and how we could . There was never a question of why. The first target date to commence our second Camino was 2013 (still whilst we were in the work force) but that has come and gone and our plans had to be cancelled for family, financial and time reasons. Since then we have done many other things including last year (2014) when I was able to walk up Mt Kilimanjaro. However, now retirement is on the horizon - just a touch over 3 years and again we are aiming to experience our second Camino. We know it will be different (nothing will ever be like our 32 days in May and June in 2009). This time we are making it different anyway in that we have no deadline at all (as we will be retired of course) so have decided to start in Le Puy. We won't have a finish date (although we do talk about perhaps a 3 month experience this time). It doesn't matter about time so we will be slow and be stopping to take in all that presents itself. Not sure if anyone else plans ahead like we (I) do and we don't really want to wish our lives away but I am aching to put on that pack again and walk. So its now out there - we hope to start around April - finishing July 2018.
SY
