After many years of thinking about a longer walk, the opportunity finally comes. My daughter is in college, my son out of college, and my husband understands that I am not happy unless I go on journeys. Now I can take advantage of this new freedom by doing what I used to do before Children: travel everywhere on a shoestring budget. Whenever I’d had enough cash saved up from my teaching in various places I would invariably fly somewhere and take long walks to feel the land, visit sacred sites, learn people’s customs, religions, foods, languages, and so on. (I did not know then that I could have made a living doing just that.) Looking back, I see that, in all these seemingly random journeys, I visited many sacred places scattered around the earth. Now the Camino was calling, and I had to answer; fortunately, it wasn’t so far away.
