Feb 16th, 2019

Author: donich_admin

Walking the Camino

In April, my friend J and I will be walking the Camino pilgrimage from St Jean de Pied Port to Santiago de Compostelo. Actually we will be slightly cheating because although J is a gentleman of leisure, I have a business to run and can only spare three weeks for it which means that I can’t walk the whole thing as it takes around 40 days. So we are walking the first part over the Pyrenees, and then transferring to Leon by bus. We will then walk the final 100km into Santiago which designates us as official pilgrims and entitles us to our certificate of completion. Along the way we will need to get our pilgrim passports stamped which you can get done in churches and tourist centres. The passport itself will be a great record of what we have achieved. I joined us up for the confraternity of St James which is one of the pilgrim association – in the picture you can see our scallop shells.

If we can make it, we should be proud of ourselves as the first day alone is 23km with 1300m of vertical ascent. This is about the same as walking 10 miles and then climbing Ben Nevis.

Last week we walked all the way around our peninsula (Lochgoilhead to Coran Lochan, to Artgartan, to the top of the Rest) which was about 22km and a fair amount of ascent, so I am quietly confident we can do it.

This week R is away doing a talk for Google in Seattle, so J is being dragged over here for some training walks. I thought that round to the top of the hydro twice for day one, followed by Cnoc Coinnich on day 2, Beinn Bheula on day three and Ben Donich on day four.

PS J – I am only joking about Beinn Bheula and Ben Donich