Let's Try This Again!

So I’m sitting in Porto, Portugal preparing to walk the Camino de Santiago Portuguese Coastal Route (I’m trying to find a cool way to shorten that, maybe the “PoCo”, or the “Cam Port”, thoughts?) starting tomorrow morning. It’s less than half the distance of my first Camino de Santiago, around 180 miles as opposed to nearly 500. I should be walking 15 days rather than 35. But I’m also nearly six years older, in roughly the same shape and definitely no wiser.

When I finished my first camino I knew immediately that I wanted to do another route sometime in the future. I actually didn’t think it would be this many years before I went again but Covid happened. Then we had other amazing adventures and the next thing you know it’s been 6 years. But there’s something about it that has been pulling me back. I love to walk and the challenge of these pilgrim routes is generally the length rather than the terrain. It’s a slow grind and that’s what I enjoyed about my previous walk. The physical demands are daunting but the mental aspect turned out to be well worth it. I was able to have a sort of mental reset. Despite spending a lot of time with amazing, diverse new friends and experiencing parts of Spain at a very intimate level I still spent many, many hours quietly walking. This led to introspection along with long periods of simple mental silence. It also occasionally led to me having some of the worst earworms I’ve ever had. I can’t remember most lyrics to great songs but give me the bassline from “Hey Ladies” by the Beastie Boys or the opening of “Total Eclipse of the Heart” by Bonnie Tyler and I can sing that shit verbatim. Repeatedly. No matter how hard I try to think of another song. Everything becomes one of those two tunes. It’s like my own mind Rickrolls me and suddenly I’m singing, “Turn Around…..”. Okay, in hindsight maybe the mental aspect wasn’t all sunshine and unicorns but it helped me clear a lot of clutter in the old noggin.

So do I think I will get the same benefits this second time around? Probably not to the same extent and I don’t think it’s realistic to expect that. I feel like I got incredibly lucky last walk with the group of people I found myself around. There were some lonely times but more often than not I found myself surrounded by kind, funny people. I had also never done anything like it before so there was a uniqueness to the experience that would be impossible to replicate.
While I don’t anticipate the same level of experience I had before, I’m hopeful it will be similar. I’ve had a rough couple of months with the passing of two long time, very close friends (over 50 years of combined friendship between the two) and while one was somewhat expected (he had been ill for years) I still wasn’t ready for it. The second was completely unexpected and a short time from diagnosis to passing. I gave one eulogy last Sunday and another the Saturday before. I’m still trying to process everything that comes with that and I’m hoping this trip might help me do that. If nothing else I’ll get to spend some time with their memories and I think that will help.

One of my favorite things last camino was sitting down and typing up a blog entry. It was a great way for me to journal what I experienced and I’ve gone back and looked at it a couple of times over the years. I plan on doing that again. I’m not sure if it will be daily entries as it was before or just whenever I feel like it. No promises, this camino might be a totally different experience than last one. I guess I’ll find out tomorrow.