Why………?

That’s a question that we’ve been asked several times.

In 2014 I answered the question as below.  Since then we have successfully completed the Camino Frances route from St Jean Pied de Port in France to Santiago de Compostela in north-west Spain. We did this in two stages each of about 250 miles, and are now planning to Walk the Camino Portuguese route which runs from Lisbon in Portugal to Santiago in Spain. This route is about 400 miles and we hope to complete it in a single session

“Why are you planning to walk The Camino de Santiago?  It’s 500 miles long, in a foreign country, and across several mountains ranges. You are mad!”

Well comments like that are hard to answer, and in most ways we can’t answer because we don’t really know ourselves, other than we do want to give it a try.  It’s not really a religious thing, for although the camino is a pilgrimage route neither of us are religious despite (or possibly because) we were brought up in a Catholic background and educated by the Nuns and Jesuits.  I suppose its more the adventure aspect, and the general physical and mental challenge of the walk that intrigues us  It’s something we’ve been considering for several years and have finally decided to do it.

It all started a few years ago when Barbara was singing with the sopranos in The Huddersfield Choral Society. The choir was invited to sing in Oporto in Portugal.  As with one or two other choral society events that took place in Europe we decided to make a holiday of the event.  We chose to take the car on the long ferry from Plymouth to Santander in northern Spain and drive down to Oporto from there. After the concert.we explored some more southerly parts of Portugal. From there we crossed back over into Spain, then on into France, across the Pyrenees (via Andorra) and finally back to the UK via the Channel Tunnel.

On the way down to Oporto we spent some time in Santiago de Compostela, in the north-west of Spain, and whilst there made our first contact with the Peregrino’s (Pilgrims) whilst we were visiting the cathedral. It was fascinating to see all these people who for many reasons, have walked many miles, and come from many places, to visit the tomb of St James.  We enquired who they were and learned some of  the story and history of  “The Camino de Santiago” or “The Way Of St James”.  For some more background information see this page.  We didn’t have enough time to investigate further, but resolved to return to this part of Spain to explore further.

A few years later we decide to return and see more as it had looked like a very interesting part of the world.  This time we drove down through France and spent all our time in northern Spain, most of it (in retrospect) being along the Camino area. Again we were very intrigued by all the pilgrim signs, hostels and the Pilgrims themselves.  This time we managed to talk to one or two of them and generally found out a lot more about “The Way”.  Gradually we found out much more information and eventually decided to try to tackle the route.

Our initial thoughts were that it could be a “target” project for us to do it before I was 70 years old.  For various reasons this didn’t happen, mainly because we decided that at that stage we were not up to being able to walk 500+ miles. However over the last couple of years we have started to do much more walking and at the start of this year felt that the time was about right, but we still weren’t sure.

So when I spotted details of a reasonably long local walk, “The White Rose Way” we used that as a test-bed.  We knew that we could walk 10-15 miles without difficulty, but could we do it day after day carrying all we needed with us?  That was the big question.  When we found that we could walk from Leeds to Scarborough (115 miles) without any great problem we started to plan “The Way” for real and set ourselves a target date of September 2014.

That date is rapidly approaching, Thirteen days from now we will board a Grand Central train in Brighouse as the first stage of our “Camino” begins.

In 2016 we are flying from Liverpool airport to Lisbon to start our Portuguese camino