15/01/2024 The best laid plans…What to expect from this blog

We had no plans to document “Supertrip”, until people asked us to. To be wholly accurate, “please tell us at great length what you did on your holidays” wasn’t exactly what people asked. What they actually asked (albeit with what seemed like a genuine hope for a “yes” answer) was “are you doing a travel blog?”

So here it is.

The core of this blog is the Garmin satellite link that (when it’s switched on) tracks our location every half hour. We’ve used it to trace all our major journeys, so that, as Carey puts it, they’ll know more-or-less where to find our bodies if we go missing… The link is https://share.garmin.com/walkthewalk.

Once we get started, there should also be photos, anecdotes, musings and so forth. We can hope that our physical progress across Spain will be marked by pithy, insightful nuggets and meaningful images that evidence, perhaps embellish, the historic spiritual journey we are taking. Fair warning, I wrote precisely nothing on my first camino, despite expecting it to open the creative sluices - no letters, no lessons, no poems, not even any emails – nada.

You can pick up a small “passport” when you start the camino. Most people do. At churches all along the route, all manner of locals, even the occasional frocked priest, wait (during prescribed hours) with inked stamps that passing pilgrims “earn” as they progress – like a medieval, evangelical fitbit, recording exercise goals. Arriving in Santiago with the appropriate stamps on the appropriate pages, you present your passport at the cathedral and obtain a certificate of completion for your records.

It struck me as both an archaic remnant from the age of Indulgences and a temporal concession to the highly modern/post-modern urge to collect a “full set”, to earn a badge or complete a level. In a real sense, an undocumented camino didn’t happen. In 2018, I thoughtfully acquired my passport and carried it past every “check point” unstamped. It felt important to step away from achievement/collection culture and just be on my feet on the path. The stampers were all surprised at my polite refusal to have my passport inked. Some even followed me out, making sure I had understood I would lose my certificate… I can’t explain how important to me it was, for that journey, not to want one.

For this trip, I have committed to writing one article per week, 500 words of less. This is the third such post. We will see.

I am aware that 500 words counts as “long form” these days. No person under the age of 40 will ever get through a whole 500 words. We are not going to be some viral sensation. Anyone under 40 actually following this page is clearly going to be a family member. They get whatever grandma/stepma/auntie is dishing out. All of you reading these know that, for me, staying below 500 words is enough of a challenge.