My name is Ian, and soon my feet will hate me.

Back in the summer of 2007 my other half Jackie and I toured northern Spain by a rather clapped out 900cc Yamaha motorcycle, which I later ended up scrapping when the MOT inspector I took it to laughed at the thought of testing it...but that's another story.

Anyway, while we were in Spain we accidentally came across the Camino De Santiago, aka the Way of St James, a pilgrimage route to the city of Santiago de Compostela in the north east corner of the country. On and off, and purely coincidentally, we ended up following the route of the pilgrimage to its terminus in Santiago.

Pilgrims in Santiago de Compostela



In the 3 or 4 years which followed that holiday we talked about walking the Camino, or at least part of it; then other things took over, like they do, and it kind of fell off the bottom of the list of things we thought about doing. Especially when we bought a narrow boat which meant that we spent most of our holidays travelling the English canal system at a very sedate speed...but that's yet another story.
At the beginning of this year, and having decided that my fixed holidays - I'm a teacher of mathematics at a secondary school on the fringes of north east London - meant that Japan would either be unbearably hot or very cold, the thought of doing the Camino de Santiago occurred to us again. And that is why about a week ago we made our travel arrangements to get to and from the Camino.
What makes things a little complicated is that while I shall be attempting to walk the whole of the Camino Frances, from the foot of the Pyranees in France to Santiago, a distance of about 800km or 500 miles, Jackie will be joining me for just the final 120km, starting in the town of Sarria. The plan is that I arrive in Sarria on the same day as she arrives and we then walk on to Santiago together. Considering that the walk to Sarria will take me some 24 days or so, actually meeting up in Sarria might be quite challenging!
So that is a rough outline of why on July 23rd 2015 I'll be climbing onto the Eurostar to Paris and then on to the small town of St Jean Pied de Port on the Franco-Spanish border to start the long walk to Santiago on July 24th.
Between now and then I'll be in training to get into shape to walk 27 - 30km a day for the best part of a month. That and getting  together the stuff that I shall be taking.