Just a Mum: On the Camino de Santiago

I am just a mum, who desperately needs an adventure.

I have mothered children for most of my life, and as the kids get older, I’m left wondering who I am and what to do next. Unfit and unmotivated, I somehow find myself walking 800km across Spain on a thing called the Camino de Santiago, an ancient pilgrimage trail. Why? I honestly don’t know! I’m not religious. Or a long-distance walker (or short-distance either) but I just HAD to do it.

In Part One I get organised for the Camino and face some stark realities about my state of fitness (groan) and the logistics of escaping mothering duties for five weeks. (yay!)

Part Two is in the form of a daily diary as I walk the Camino; Blisters, the benefits of eating breakfast and an odd singing Chinese man. Musings about life, enduring shared sleeping quarters with snoring foreigners, more blisters, questioning faith and finding it, reaching the edges of my sanity and the making of lifelong pilgrim friends. With an abundance of humour and brutal honesty I tell what it was really like for this ‘Just a mum’ to take on this insane idea and what the Camino taught me about myself and my role in life as a mother.