We have a change in plan so we can leave 3 days early !!! YEAH !!! We will be leaving Florida this Friday, August 14, 2015 so we only have 2 more training walks on Wednesday and Thursday. We are starting to wake up at 4 AM and we start our walk at 5 AM, slowly getting ourselves adjusted to France time.

This morning we put in a 3 hours walk. We will have another 4 hours walk either on Wednesday or Thursday and that will be the end of the training.

Our bags are packed and ready. We are so ready to go, mentally and physically. We feel so much better this year than last year, may be we are more confident that we will be able to walk and finish while last year we were very worried not knowing if we will be able to make it to Santiago or not. May be it’s also our disposition, we know the joy is the journey, not the destination, so we are not too fixated about arriving. We are able to find joy, even in the preparation walk, we really enjoy every day as we get ourselves ready for the big trip.

One thing about us, living in Florida, with plenty of sunshine, we are already pretty tanned, our boots pretty well broken in, so even at the start we look pretty “seasoned”. I can remember on the camino de Santiago, you can pretty much tell who’s a newcomer on the camino and who has been doing for more than a few hundred miles. The new comers always look so pale, their shoes all brand new, then the next few days they start to burn from the sun, and their feet start to swell up or they start to limp around from the pain of blisters.

There are pilgrims that walk out of their homes and start walking to Santiago. We met 3 men last year that started out of the doors of their own homes in Holland and started walking to Santiago. That would make their walk total for one way to about three thousand miles. And one of them is going to walk back to Holland once he has reached Santiago! Those pilgrims sometimes laughed at the pilgrims who start in Le puy, walking “only” one thousand miles. Then the pilgrims who start in Le puy look down on the pilgrims who start from St Jean Pied de port, as they only walk 500 miles! And the pilgrims from Le puy make fun of the pilgrims who start out at Saria, as they only walk 100 miles. But there is one thing in common, all those pilgrims look down on the “tour grims”, they are the ones that sit on an air conditioned coach bus, the bus take them from one town to the next, and as they arrive into the town, the “tour grims” would get off the bus, walk for a fe yards, take a whole bunch of pictures, they are all decked out with back packs and walking sticks and hats, but they only walk perhaps only a few steps from the bus to the different vistas to take their pictures. And if you think the hierarchy stops here, you are wrong. All the walking pilgrims kind of look down on the cyclists, who arrive every day earliest to the refugios to get a bed for the night. And of course, these self supporting cyclists look down on the cycling pilgrims that are supported by motorized cars that carry all their bags!!!!

In a way, it’s kind of “bad” to be thinking that way. I guess not everybody has the time to walk for 6 months or six thousand miles, and sometimes not everybody have the physical ability to do such a long walk. They do what ever they can and they should be applauded for their effort, no matter how short their walk on the camino is. Ed and I are pretty laid back, We are slow walkers ourselves and every morning, no matter how early we leave the town, we always manage to arrive dead last, just in time for the evening pilgrim dinner. Some mornings on the camino, we would be joking and counting how many pilgrims are going to pass us as we walk slowly on our day’s walk. But one thing about the two of us, we arrive. We arrive every night and that’s all that counts. We walk slowly but steadily and we don’t give up and we arrive. And I know it’s going to be the same thing this year. We will just take it slowly, steadily and we will get to our destination one day at a time and before ewe know it, we would have walked the whole 500 miles.

Here are some pictures of the two of us training in Fort Myers, walking out the door of our office in the dark of the early morning at 5 AM and putting in the training miles to break in our boot and getting our legs and feet stronger.

Two more days to go.

Bon Chemin ….