Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Camino De Santiago

Buen Camino!

In several months, Hannah & I will be walking the Camino De Santiago. I'll be posting more info about this in the coming months, but as a summary we'll be walking about 800kms across the north of Spain. This will be completely on foot, and is supposed to take around 5 weeks of walking between 25~30kms per day.

We also have a few friends that will be joining us for parts of the journey, so it'll be a wonderful experience spending time with them on such an adventure.

There's a few things we need to do beforehand:
  • Get fit. This is a biggie, as I'm not exactly in tip-top condition. Hiking & walking while carrying heavy loads will probably constitute a large part of the training, but we're also going to retire the car as much as possible and build walking into our daily lifestyle.
  • Research and purchase the most suitable gear to take. This would include backpacks, footwear (shoes/sandals), clothes for all conditions, walking poles, etc. We'll have to carry our gear the entire distance, so weight is very much an issue.
  • Get tourist visas, and whatever other bureaucratic red tape we need. I've NFI what is involved.
  • Learn at least some Spanish. I currently no hablo EspaƱol.
  • Read everything I can about the topic and anything remotely associated with it.
  • Research the best way of keeping my Nikon D80 charged up, and archiving photos to safe storage. (I've learned the hard way... don't assume people won't steal your stuff.)
  • Learn how to sketch. I want to take time in between walking and siestas to sketch things along the route.
It seems like a pretty short list, right? What could posibly go wrong? X-D (Actually it'd be pointless if nothing went wrong. The whole point is to test ourselves.)

This blog will primarily be about our preparations for the Camino, and once we're there we'll be posting updates from the road.

Buen Camino!

2 comments:

the topless executive said...

I've NFI what the Camino is...

arg zero said...

The Camino is a pilgrimage of about 800kms across the north of Spain. It can be done for either the traditional Christian reasons (see the wiki page here) or for a purely physical/mental endurance challenge.