About

In October 2014 I left my job in Melbourne and followed my girl to Paris. And as L was not content with even that level of commitment, she decided we should walk from Paris to Spain in the summertime, leaving our apartment in the 18th arrondissement and finishing up in Santiago. We would follow the ancient routes of the various caminos through France and Spain. Back in Melbourne L had floated this idea before, but with everything as it was then up in the air I thought she might have come to her senses by the time we were both together again. She had not.

Honestly, I hate walking. My idea of adventurous travel is leaving the hotel bar. 9 weeks of humping a pack through the nowheres of France and Spain when the rail network was really quite extensive seemed ridiculous. I was made to lounge, to loiter, to loaf.

And then in the midst of planning for the walk my attitude changed. Only in certain parts – on the whole I still believed it was a crazy idea. But going through the maps and seeing the forests we’d walk through, the rivers we’d walk along, and the towns we’d visit started to pique my interest.

I assumed too that once we hit the Bordeaux region wine would become abundant and delicious. I could think of it as a summer job. I’d work eight hours a day walking and then drop my things at a village brasserie around happy hour, or else I could buy a bottle of cheap plonk from some farmer or roadside grog cart (if such a thing exists).

It’s hard to know at the beginning how much leg pain you’re actually in for (I’m guessing a lot) and how much you’ll enjoy the overall experience. Maybe I’ll enjoy the walk and discover some new sense of spiritually long dormant. Maybe I’ll spend the walk in a hungover funk 20 paces behind L, groaning my way from town to town. Hell, maybe we’ll be eaten by wolves.

I’m not much of a fan of travel blogging. The writing is dense with adverbs, the tone is set firmly on manic-cheerful, and the people in the towns and cities fade from view in a slideshow of photos of monuments, buildings and street food. Writing about a long walk can become a quick repetition of the same things: I walked, I stopped, I took pictures of old buildings and my dinner. So with this in mind I will try and break up the monotony as much as I can in what I put up here. It’s not something I’ll see as being wildly popular in any case. I prefer to see it as a means of recording the adventure and as something to look back upon. It also provides the motivation to try new things, to not be complacent wherever I go, to look for interesting things. If this means accepting invitations to dinner and to stay overnight with seedy backwoods farmers, then I’ll do it. If it means staying out far too late to chat with the brasserie barflies while they tell me the history of the town, I’m in. At immense personal risk to myself I will leave no stone unturned and no drink half-finished, and I hope that somewhere in it all a reader might find something of interest there.

And if this doesn’t provide you with enough vicarious entertainment, feel free to check out the other side of the story. L is recording her own version of events over here.