The Why

So all this came about during one of the many visits between my family and Carleana´s family. She was talking about this pilgrimage that she had heard of in Spain after reading Paolo Coelho book The Pilgrimage. The more we talked about it the more interested I became. Then I bought a copy of the book The Pilgrimage and was even more interested. Finally I started doing some research about it and discovered some cool facts. I also stumbled onto the website for Camino Ways (a company that arranges and books tours).

Carleana decided that she was absolutely going to do it. I said that I was interested and the planning began. She agreed to let me tag along. I mean it took us almost a year and a half between making the decision and actually planning it. Hats off to Carleana who did a lot of the legwork for arranging things. Then it came close to crunch time and we finally booked our flight on March 20th of this year. On March 30th we finalized and paid for our Camino. For a while there it all seemed surreal and it wasn´t until I actually had the plane ticket and the printout of our itinerary that it all became real.

Then it was a waiting game and the excitement kept building (as well as my fear about whether or not I was capable of doing any of this). It had been almost 20 years since my last trip to Europe and I wasn´t too confident about my Spanish. But with the love and encouragement of my wonderful husband, Cameron, I began to gain confidence.

Over the last several years, I´ve had some personal struggles and I was ready to do something different and not common fir people from North America. It was a way for me to prove a few things to myself about myself.

So it became a waiting game. Honestly, after March it seemed that time flew by because of so many factors. The school year was wrapping up, the boys were ready for summer holidays (and let´s be honest so was mom!) Then after June it seemed that I had barely time to breathe before I was packing for my trip (I did pack three times and kept taking things out and putting other things in) and going off to the airport for my big adventure with my good friend Carleana.