90 Days

It's now a little over 90 days since we walked into Santiago de Compostela at the end of around 1,000 klms on the road.

Readers of this blog will recall that the last days of the walk had been tough at times. Out of that grew what I might describe as a disproportionate amount of negativity about the whole trip.

When we got home, and even now sometimes, people would comment on how hard the walk had been, and how we'd struggled. On balance that wasn't, and isn't, the way I recalled it, or wanted to recall it. In those early days after we returned a wise piece of advice I received was to put any post-trip "analysis" on hold for 3 months, just to let it balance and distil and percolate.

So here I am, some 90 days later with some "learnings" from the Via.

• It's good to have a travelling companion. Life has by and large been incredibly good to me. One of the really good things is the time I spend with Janet. We rarely spend a great deal of time apart, and this trip was certainly no exception. I hope that I never take this for granted

• Sometimes it's necessary to compromise. I think that had I been walking entirely on my own I might have pushed on through the wet weather towards the end. Who knows? It's easy to say that in hindsight. But no matter, Janet wasn't enjoying herself, so it was the right thing for me to do to support her by pulling out for that week

• It's never all bad. Perhaps it's a recency effect, perhaps it's something else, but the harder days often seem to be front of mind. But if I sit back and count, those harder days were very few in number. They just seem that way at times

• And in any case, even if had all been easy, that's not the way of life. There is always the "this, too, shall pass" aspect to this very limited journey through time which we are all given, and as trite as it might sound, I at least really do learn more from the hard times than the easy ones

• There is natural beauty everywhere. Maybe not traditional. Perhaps not always obvious. But around all the same. You might need to look for it

• We made some lovely connections. Some only lasted a few hours; some a bit longer. In the greater scheme of life, most will be fleeting, ephemeral. But they were real in the moment. Most people are decent

• There's always a great deal to see and learn as a traveller. In full Mark Twain's "travel broadens the miind" quote was, I believe: Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime

• You can never see too many miliarios. Self evident 😉

Until we next meet ...