Spain, Getting there

I made an almost instantaneous decision to go to Spain on a dismal day in March when things were not going well at work. Work is normally good and often even very good so a bad week or two is an unusual event and I suppose I can thank that irregularity for the motivation to go. I certainly hadn't been planning on going to Spain on holidays. I had heard about the Camino less than a year before and found the idea attractive: you walk. You travel to Spain, you carry only the necessities, you walk, you eat and find accommodation along the way, you meet people, see the scenery... but most of all you walk.

So I was sitting at my desk, feeling miserable, when an Air Canada advertisement pinged my email and I thought, “What am I waiting for?” Really, it was that simple. Beyond the impulse, I had enough presence of mind to consider that I could afford 2 weeks off in late spring, that would give me about 10 days outside of travel-time, and I could easily walk 20 km a day. So a total of 200 km... I googled a map of the Camino and measured, roughly, 200 km east of Santiago de Compostela which suggested a starting point at Ponferrada. Done! Within 15 minutes I had booked my flights.

I returned to my day-job buoyant and got more done in the next hour or two than I had accomplished all day. That night I made one more strategic move: I emailed my sister and sister-in-law to inform them of what I had done. The three of us have done some hiking in the past and I had mentioned the attraction of the Camino and they had loosely agreed that it sounded nice. But all of that talk had been almost a year before. Nevertheless, within 48 hours they had both also booked flights to Madrid.

(I had almost no access to the internet while I was away so these posts are added after the fact. I'm writing from my paper-based notes & adding a bit from memory. This explains -- I hope! -- why the verb tenses seem to jump around a little in this account. Photos for this blog are here.)