Tuesday 17 May 2016

My Camino

As you can probably gather from its title, this blog is intended to document my forthcoming travels on the Camino Frances in July and August 2016.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Camino Frances, a brief overview. It's one of several Camino pilgrim trekking routes across Spain and parts of Europe - each known individually as the "Camino ..." - that generally seem to converge on the town of Santiago de Compostela in north-western Spain. The Camino Frances appears to be by far the most popular of the various Caminos, with many thousands of pilgrims from across the globe starting and finishing their Camino at various villages and towns along the way.

From what I can gather, the conventional long-haul Camino Frances route, which is the one I'll be taking, starts in the small village of St Jean Pied de Port in southern France, at the foot of the Pyrenees. From there, it's a quick 800 kilometres across the northern part of Spain to the finish line in the great cathedral at SDC.

In preparing for this journey, I've stumbled across several blogs that some extremely erudite pilgrims have written about their own Caminos and the thought occurred to me, since I'm going to be walking the walk, that perhaps I should also give it a go. I'm certainly not new to the blogging game, being the author of two other reasonably long-running blogspot blogs that record some other aspects of my life. (If you're interested, "PengoQuest" details my various attempts to break the world record high score on a 1980's video arcade game called Pengo; while "BQQuest" chronicles my attempt to run a marathon in a time that will qualify me to enter the Boston marathon, the holy grail of marathons. That qualifying time, which is age-based, is known in the trade as a "Boston Qualifier", or simply a "BQ".)

But despite this blogging pedigree, I can guarantee you I won't be anywhere near as entertaining as some of those other Camino blogging folk out there. Although if you do enjoy it and/or get something out of it, great. If you don't, well that's blogging I guess. I can assure you there's plenty of other Camino blogs out there that you can profit from.

The plan is to try and write up and post my journey day-by-day from the time I leave my home town of Sydney, Australia, on 4 July 2016 to the time I leave Spain at the scheduled end of the trek five weeks later on 11 August.

Before then, and in the next few posts, I'll take you through some of the preparations and other bits and pieces relevant to what promises to be a very interesting little adventure.

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