I’m leaving for Spain tomorrow to lead my second hiking trip on the Camino de Santiago. Twelve travelers will be joining me and my co-leaders, Brenda Porter and Andre Mallinger, next week for a journey we’ve dubbed “The Creative Camino.” The creative part? I’ll be teaching writing and Brenda will teach sketching and watercolor as we hike the last 100 kilometers of the Camino.
Several times during our sixteen-day pilgrimage we’ll rest our feet and spend a day focusing on writing and art. The rest of the time, we’ll be hiking 8-14 miles a day, and our art and writing will be on the go. We’ll look for small ways to flavor our journey across Spain with creative spirit as we walk kilometer after kilometer, following yellow arrows all the way to Santiago de Compostela, where the Camino ends.
After I say goodbye to our group in mid-September, I’ll be flying from Santiago to Egypt, to visit my daughter and her partner who are living there an extended visit. I’ll be staying with them in the Sinai in Dahab (I imagine a small modest little hut on the beach, but I’ll have to wait and see!). Naturally I’m excited to see my daughter and her partner. And this will be my first trip to Egypt; I’m stoked!
Yesterday, I figured out a way to ship my hiking boots, all my gear and teaching supplies home before flying on to Egypt so I can travel light and unencumbered.
It’s going to be quite a journey.
As I pack my bags for the third time in three months, I can’t believe I’m going on another trip. It wasn’t that long ago that Karyn and I returned from three+ weeks camping and hiking in the Sierra Mountains of California. Eleven days before that, I’d flown back from 40 days in Bali, leading two back-to-back retreats.
My time at home this summer has been pretty much pitstops between adventures—enough time to pick some tomatoes from the garden, cook a few meals, visit family, see a few friends, jam in some work, pay bills, catch up on urgent emails, hang a few loads of wash on the line, and ignore pretty much everything else—then start packing again.
As I make my final preparations to depart, I’m not sure how I feel about all this back-to-back travel. Though, as Karyn loves to tell me, “Laura, you created and orchestrated every bit of it.” Yes, she’s right—guilty as charged!
This extended summer of TRAVEL has been a great big experiment for me. Motivated by my love of travel, my love of how I show up and feel when I travel, and my current motto: “While I still can…” I just kept saying yes to opportunities, yes to my own generative ideas.
So here I am heading out again, back to Spain and the Camino. Just yesterday I wrote to all our travelers and asked them to start considering the inner journey they might be taking as we walk all those miles.
I’m asking myself the same question: What is my pilgrimage going to be about?
That’s something I can’t tell you. If I knew, it wouldn’t be a pilgrimage. It has to be discovered.
Stay tuned. I’ll be keeping a Virtual Vacation blog of this trip, as I usually do, posting updates on social media every day or every other day (links below), so if you want to follow my journey on a daily basis, do it there. I’ll also email out a digest of each week’s posts with the writing prompts I already send out each Tuesday. If you’d like to get the digest and aren’t on my email list, you can subscribe for free here.
I’ll also email out a digest of each week’s posts with the writing prompts I already send out each Tuesday. If you’d like to get the digest and aren’t on my email list, you can subscribe for free here.