I’ve been craving to do the biggest getaway of my life.
Most of us are pretty familiar with the feeling of needing to “get away” after you spend a period of time being in a repetitive cycle of work, school, friends, and tradition. What satisfies that? How far do you have to go? How long do you need to go for? How far is too far and how long is too long?
To understand the rest of this post, I recommend either watching “The Way” with Martin Sheen or researching this website:
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The trip was planned about 4 weeks before I left. I took the time off work, calculated my finances and it was done! I booked this trip to be 7 weeks in length with a budget of about $2000.
I began my research with John Brierley’s book on Camino Pilgrim Guides. This book is your survival guide to the Camino:
He explains what to pack before hand using statistics and numbers of body weight, body height, agility, and how active you are before going on the camino. He recommends how to train before doing the camino. He always encourages to pack light -which is no joke at all- because of how packing too much can bring injury to your body while walking the Camino. The best part is that he also suggests ways to prepare spiritually and mentally for this trip. At first, I didn’t take that part seriously. Now I wish so strongly that I had taken that seriously… I don’t normally say this, but he was right. Preparation is KEY. Whether it be physical, mental, spiritual, etc. Make sure you’re ready before going into battle.
Training. So crucial to this trip. First things first, I am a healthy girl but I am not the most “fit in my class”. To prepare for the long days of walking, I stopped taking public transport to get where I needed to go in my home town and started walking instead (that includes stopping the use of a personal vehicle). I also lightly packed my backpack and walked around the trails in my hometown for hours (in my new hiking shoes to break them in), even though people looked at me funny and thought I was running away from home.
What I did wrong:
I walked for hours on flat surfaces such as sidewalks, low-difficulty trails and roads. Getting to the Camino, the first kilometre of the whole trip is climbing the steepest kilometre of the entire camino upwards, and at that moment I realized I had not trained the way I was supposed to for this trip. Lesson #1: Do a LOT of hiking as your training. I’m talking uphill, downhill, rocky, slippery, farmland, muddy, and anything else you can think of that you wouldn’t find in a regular town.
The second thing I did wrong was walking around my hometown with a lightly packed backpack, rather than completely packing it the way I would have on my actual trip. That being said, you definitely don’t need to pack 30 Clif Bars with you like I did… You will NOT run out of food. I promise. Lesson #2: Take “pack light” SERIOUSLY. Because I hadn’t practiced walking with the full weight of my backpack, I had to take my backpack off approximately 4 times in 1 kilometre because of how much it was weighing me down. Only pack a small, sample-sized shampoo bottle and keep refilling it as you go along, but DO NOT pack a 750mL shampoo bottle to carry around for the whole trip… I learned that the hard way.
The entire trip is not as savage as it can be imagined. There is daily access to wi-fi (which in Europe is pronounced “wee-fee”) so you never really need to worry about being out of touch, or even bothering with a phone plan sometimes. Depends on how attached you regularly are to your phone! Lesson #3: Save money on the long-distance phone charges. There is wi-fi almost everywhere!