Well, as foreshadowed in my last post, I can confirm that the flights, bus and trains have been booked and that I’m headed back to St Jean Pied de Port to do it all again.
I fly into London on Wednesday 9 November 2016, then leave for Paris the next evening, before jumping on the TGV there at 8:23am Friday 11 November headed south. Assuming I make all the connections and the relevant transport workers stay on the job, I’m aiming to walk out of St Jean on the morning of Saturday 12 November on the Camino Frances to Santiago de Compostela. I’ll stop there to collect my compostela hopefully sometime in mid-December, and then it’s on a bus straight to Porto, where I’ll turn around (after a day or so exploring what seems to be a very pretty town) and walk the Camino Portuguese back to Santiago - arriving on Christmas Day.
It’s here that I’ve pre-booked my only accommodation of the journey (the Parador Hotel in Santiago, that huge place adjacent to the cathedral) for Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
After I’ve loaded up on Christmas pudding, the plan then is to head out to Finisterre and Muxia, arriving back in Santiago - for the third time - on New Year’s Eve.
A few weeks wandering around Europe and England in the January sunshine will close things off before I head home at the start of February to thaw out in the remnants of a Sydney summer.
It actually sounds quite simple and straightforward when written like this, so I hope I’m not sounding disrespectful of the magnitude of what I’m about to attempt. Fifty days on the camino in the middle of winter is going to be one tough assignment. And the more I read about the hardships endured by previous winter pilgrims, and my lack of any real experience of walking in (or generally experiencing) atrocious weather, the greater my trepidations.
While I’m excited to get going, to seeing some of these places covered in snow, and to navigating tracks that will have turned to mush, I will miss the summer experience of sitting in outdoor cafes munching on salads and drinking tea under a shady umbrella. This time, I expect I’ll be consuming most of my meals huddled around a heater or fire of some sort.
And loving it!
Finally, a procedural note. As with my blog on “Camino 1”, I’ll be writing up my story of “Camino 2” and “Camino 3” as I go along, but I won’t post it all until I get back to Australia. So something to look forward to, folks!
But I will post one last time before I leave with a summary of my training, a packing list, and some other bits and pieces. See you then.
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