Finisterre

I took 1000-mile walk along the Camino de Santiago from the South of France to the coast of Spain. A midlife journey of love and loss. Here's the story.

Preface

In the spring I will walk the Chemin de Saint Jacques de Compostelle to Santiago, Spain, along one of the four main pilgrimage routes from France. The walk is literally a journey of a thousand miles, the one we’ve all heard about, the one that starts with the single step.

Mine will start at the doorstep of our home in Rognes, France just north of Aix-en-Provence in the southeast. I’ll walk through the early spring grapevines behind our house and then up into the hills overlooking our small town, then over to Arles, on towards Toulouse, through the rising Pyrenees, then Basque country, Jaca, the hot plains of northern Spain and beyond and beyond and beyond, until I run out of continent on the coast of Spain. March, April, May, possibly early June.

I plan to stay in ten euro a night pilgrimage hostels. When it is my turn at the refugio spigot, I’ll clean my clothes beneath the cold tap. I’ll dry them in my bunk on a cord I stretch over my sleeping bag. I’ll tend to my aching pilgri…