C is for Camino de Santiago

 A to Z(ed) Blogging Challenge - (my) Life in the time of CoVid-19

C is for Camino de Santiago

It has been a dream of mine to one day walk the Camino de Santiago.  I had thought it would be a good goal to do it the year I turned sixty-five. 

Guess who turned sixty-five in 2020? 

So that plan was kiboshed as all travel came to a halt in March 2020. 

Serendipity played a part when an advertisement came across my facebook feed for My Virtual Mission and the opportunity to walk the Camino, well, virtually.

I didn't take too long to decide to go for it and signed up and started walking on May 27, 2020.  Due to on-going hip problems, and heart issues which were (and still are) being investigated I logged any steps I took in a day whether inside the house, or outside for short walks.  I started walking outside with nordic poles to give myself confidence in case I got dizzy while walking, which happened quite often in the beginning.  

Although the app will keep track of the miles, and did, I also felt compelled to track them all manually in my logbook.  

I plugged away through the summer, and on into the fall.  In total I filled seven pages tracking my miles.  The pages weren't sequential as other things were interspersed like notes from doctor phone calls, to-do lists, knitting instructions, spinning projects and even the notes from a self-publishing workshop I attended via zoom.  (Some, or all of these things may become a post for this challenge at a later letter/date).

Originally I had planned to finish the 480.9 miles by the end of the year.  However in the beginning I was averaging two to three miles a day, so I changed my goal to finish on my sixty-fifth birthday. - October 17th.  It was a lofty goal and seemed so perfect.   I could do it if I continued to log two and a half miles a day.  Life intervened and some days all I could manage was a half a mile.  The black dog had reared its head - partly because of the pandemic going on and on, partly because I was overwhelmed with all the medical tests, but mostly because I reacted badly to a heart medication I was on. I gave myself permission to change the goal once again to the end of the year. 

I stopped the medication (with the doctor's okay), and I contacted my naturopath.  She started me on a big regime of vitamins and by the end of October I was starting to feel better.  There was a hiccup at the end of November when a broncoscopy left me with a bad cough for a week but I wasn't giving up.  

December 3, 2020 I finished!  

I even got a medal a few weeks later:

One day I will do the walk in person.  That is a promise to myself. 

I walked 2.4 miles the day I finished.  I only needed 2 miles to finish.  So guess what I did?

I started a virtual walk around Iceland with the extra .4 of a mile.  I even talked three friends into joining me so we can cheer each other on.  I have completed 517.7 km of the total 1332.5 km. I hope to finish by December 31, 2021.  This time I feel well enough to only log the miles I walk outside. 

And then?  

Then I am going to virtually walk around Kruger Park in Africa.  

There is no stopping me now.