It’s official. We have 7 more days to go before we head out to the airport for our flight to France to start this year’s pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago. This year’s section will be a 500 miles walk starting from Le Puy-en-Velay, passing through Conques, Figeac, Cahors, Moissac,Aire-sur-l’Adour and Navarrenx before it reaches the border town of Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port. When we arrive into Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port in September 22, 2015, we would be at the start of our Camino de Santiago last year, thus realizing that we would have walked 1000 miles from Le Puy to Santiago combining our two pilgrimage in two year! We are very excited and we are looking forward to this year’s walk as the count down begins starting today.

We have been training the last week, walking for 2 hours a day for four days, then 3 hours yesterday and today we put in a nice long walk for 4 hours. We walked right out the door of our office on Swamp Cabbage court in Fort Myers and headed downtown, then we crossed the 401 bridge over the Caloosahatchee river. After we crossed the bridge, we made a U turn and walked back to our office, a nice long 4 hours walk. We get to look at the nice scenery, the marinas with lots of boats, walked through the palm trees lined streets, hence Fort Myers’ nickname: City of Palms. We took a nice break midway from our walk for an ice cream, I had a cold Ben and Jerry ice cream bar while Ed had two popsicles. It was refreshing!

Fo the next 7 days, the training will be a bit more interesting. We will continue to walk of course, but we also will try our best to get our schedule set to France time. We will have to wake up much earlier and walk earlier in the morning so we can be ready to adjust to France’s time. As France is a goo 6 hours ahead of us, the more adjusted we are to the timing, the faster we will be able to wake up and start walking without difficulty early in the morning France time.

Some of our friends are wondering why do we walk for such a long stretch. 500 miles is a lot of miles. It’s true that it’s a very long walk, it is painful at time, sore foot, blisters, hot day walking through the fields. It’s no club med vacation where we can sit on the sand sipping martinis. Yet the reward of the journey is just beyond word. It’s magical. It’s hard to describe, No word can really do justice to this wonderful experience. All i can say is after our walk last year, Ed would often say to me “honey, that was the happiest time in my life”. That’s just about sum it up. Why is it so wonderful? It’s a miracle everyday on the way.

We look forward to this journey this year very much. We know it will be a wonderful journey.

The camino Le Puy will take us about 5 weeks to walk the entire route. We are planning to walk about 15 to 20 miles a day. The walk this year will be somewhat more strenuous than last year, constant up and and downs, rarely flat, starting in the volcanic Velay region, passing through the mountainous Aubrac plateau before descending to the abbey at Conques. It then continues through the hilly limestone scrubland to Cahors and then through undulating farmland to Moissac and on to the Basque country in the foothills of the Pyrenees. The walk will take us across ancient bridges that were once traversed by thousands of pilgrims since the middle age, we will be visiting many medieval churches, abbeys and cathedrals dedicated to St James. On the way, there are constant reminders for us mortal humans of an historic past with many references to the pilgrims who walked the same routes in the Middle Ages in order to reach Santiago de Compostela.

We look forward to sharing with you our wonderful journey ahead and as they say in France … Bon Chemin ….