I am very eager to tread on the path that Charlemagne, El Cid, and countless others have trod since the ninth century and to explore sites associated with the murderous monks known as the Knights Templar; the peculiar fortress said to contain the real secret that Adam learned when he bit into the apple; and places housing relics such as a vial of the Virgin Mary’s milk and a sheet of Saint Bartholomew’s skin.

In fact, on the very first day of my hajj, I will hike a road which was used by Napoleon’s armies and Charlemagne’s paladins.  After descending from the Pyrenees Mountains (through the seven levels of the Candy Cane Forest, past the sea of twirly, swirly gumdrops), I will enter Navarra, the land of the Spanish Basques, and stay in Roncesvalles, the most notorious killing field of the Middle Ages.  Roncesvalles.  Killing field.  Middle Ages.  Clearly, I have some boning up to do as “Pea Brain” is too generous a tag for me when it comes to recalling particulars of French and Spanish history.

Though I once knew a capful about the devastation of Spain’s Franco era, and a thimbleful concerning her recovery under King Juan Carlos, the facts surrounding all of the events have dimmed as have my memories of the Roland and Charlemagne tales.

For this reason, I spent the afternoon rereading pertinent parts of my old European Civilizations text book and an analysis of the great medieval epic Chanson de Roland.  After studying both, my mind augmented from pea to grape, and I became all the more delighted to be heading to Roncesvalles, the mysterious place where Charlemagne avenged his nephew Roland’s death.  Assuming that you too would like a refresher, I am here to please.  Click Read More and allow me to set the stage.

Rob and I went on a great practice hike.  We again went into the Sierra above and to the west of Graeagle, California.  Because we had a wine-tasting event to get back for, we did not have time to trek a lot of miles.  What we lacked in distance, however, we made up for in steepness.  It was a physically demanding route, especially with twenty-five-pound packs on our backs.  By three miles, our hearts were pounding their little artery fists on the walls of our chests, screaming to get out; our faces were morphing into purple onions; and our toes were threatening to defect our feet altogether.  Moreover, the disrespect we were shown by our knees was beyond rude and quite possibly criminal.  But, if there is gain where there is pain-- and there was pain— the abuse surely upped our profits.

My (let's just call them Camino-Food-and-Lodging) stocks gained 12.06% today, heh, heh, heh, the very amount of my outstanding speeding ticket.

Today, after getting a tetanus shot, I began the process of toughening sensitive spots on my feet and arms so that they will not blister or chafe.  I had a pharmacist order me a tincture of benzoin--  a sticky resin from the Styrax genus of trees and shrubs that is used to create a mucosal coating in the mouths of people who suffer from cankar sores and to provide adhesion for medical tape and bandages.  Between now and the time of my puddle jump, I will repeatedly apply the tincture to hot spots on my feet and arms in order to try and create a blister-resistant layer of skin in high-friction areas.

My cerulean blue thirty-five-litre women’s Gregory Inyo backpack arrived early, as did my dissolvable shampoo, soap, and laundry sheets.  I opened the soap stuffs first.  What?  They are each the size of a tic tac container!  They are like those Listerene strips you dissolve on your tongue for a quick breath remedy.  Really?  I am supposed to get fifty hair washings, legs shavings, and clothes washings out of these?  Well, at least they will get me to Paris without a hassle from the Transportation Security Administration. 

Now to open the Queen Mother of backpacks!  I am so excited!  It is from Moosejaw.  You know, Moosejaw?  “Backpacking, Climbing, French Kissing, Mountaineering, Trail Running.”  Gotta love Moosejaw!  In fact, the cardboard box has a big red lip sticker on it that says “Sealed With a Kiss.”  Aww.  I slash through the packing tape and pull Her Majesty out.  What a beaut!  So narrow.  And super looooong.       

After three hours of packing, compressing, distributing, redistributing, recompressing, and repacking, I set my gorgeous, now-plump, backpack down dorsally onto the bed.  It looks like a baby’s car seat just waiting for a tot to climb into.  Rather than climb in toddler style, however, I lower my back on top of it and fasten the waist and chest buckles.  Then.  I.  Just.  Lie.  There.  Not because I am in need of a rest, but because, like a stag beetle, I am stuck on my back.  Hulk noises and straining avail nothing.  Eventually, after rocking back and forth a couple of times, I propel myself to my feet.  The combination of my terrific propulsion and the weight of my top-heavy pack slam me face down to the floor, barely missing Pickle Headed Ninny Muggins.  Thinking I am trying to kill their Chihuahua brother, the beagle and yellow lab bark and howl themselves into a frenzy.        

Being that it is easier to arise from my face than from my beetle back, I get up without more trouble.  I cinch a dozen straps then head to a mirror to take a gander.  Wow.  I look like a taffy-blue walking canoe.  Good golly.  I then climb on the scale to weigh my new turtle shell.    Twenty-seven pounds!  What am I going to do?  I realistically cannot walk to my mailbox and back with this on me.  My head, neck, shoulders, back, hips, arms, and hands hurt, and I have only walked from the bedroom to the bathroom.  Furthermore, I either have strapped something wrong, or this contraption can double as a mammogram device.

Last night, Rob walked in the door with an envelope addressed to “LISA KAREEN SAWYER” from the American Pilgrims on the Camino, an American confraternity that does much to prepare and maintain the Camino’s route and facilities.  I was excited to receive it, because I knew that it contained my pilgrim passport credencial!  In order to stay at pilgrim hostels and to receive a compostela (certificate of completion of pilgrimage to Santiago), you have to give proof that you walked or rode by horseback at least the last 100 kilometers of the route from Sarria or, if you traveled by bicycle, that you rode the last 200 kilometers.  Proof is obtained by having the credencial stamped with a rubber stamp sello by the wardens hospitaleros in the pilgrim hostels or at cathedrals, churches, bars, and town halls along the way.

Ripping open the envelope, I pulled out my credencial and stared at it.  Dopily, I imagined how it would look ten weeks from now, when I presented it to the Oficina del Peregrino in the Casa de Dean adjacent to the Praza Obradoiro and Cathedral in Santiago de Compostela-- filled with purple, blue, black, orange, turquoise, and brown stamps.  The credencial’s accompanying letter by the Membership Chair of the American Pilgrims on the Camino reminded me that the Camino de Santiago is “a thousand years long” and that I am about to become a part of it.  Further, Mister Membership Chair told me that he wished the Camino de Santiago would lead me to experiences and discoveries that would stay with me always and, most particularly, that he wished I would send him a donation.

I have transformed my daughters’ room into a packing coliseum.  On the dresser and piano are stacks of folded shirts, pants, socks and undies.  On the bed are piles of charging devices and first aid supplies.  In a laundry basket are my dandy camera, cheap headlamp, temperamental flashlight, and the teeny binoculars that my dad bequeathed to me six weeks before he died.  I am still waiting to receive laundry soap sheets that supposedly dissolve and turn sudsy with water.  My pack should not weigh more than ten percent of my body weight, that is, fifteen pounds.  Um.  Hmm.  When my backpack arrives in two days, I’ll gather all this stuff up and see exactly what it weighs.  Between then and now, I will continue fooling myself that it weighs fifteen pounds; that I can fit it all into the backpack; and that I can carry the blasted thing on my unbrawny-more-like-uber-scrawny back for five hundred miles.

This morning, I did something gutsy.  In an attempt to aggressively grow the money I will need for food and lodging on the Camino, I took all of the money I have for the trip and purchased shares of stock in IDNG (Independent Energy Corp.), an oils sands exploration-stage company with natural gas and oil assets in the United States and Canada.  It is a stock that I have been watching for a while which has performed well the last three months.  My hope is that they will quickly appreciate so that I can sell them right before I depart for France and have more money for the pilgrimage (and to cover a speeding ticket).  It is of course a gamble as their value could just as easily tumble.

As of this afternoon, I have lost $3.00.

I have been suffering diverticular pain for a couple of days.  I am so afraid that this is going to happen while I am on the Camino.  My last bad flare-up was just six weeks ago.  Rob and I were supposed to go for a good hike yesterday, but I spent the day in bed.  I am all dressed to try and do some conditioning today, but I do not think this side pain is going to let me leave.  Dang it.

Saturday I got trekking poles, blister remedy stuff, another pair of zip-off convertible pants, and a wrong-sized t-shirt: burnt sienna, the very crayon color I most hated as a child.  I am still awaiting the arrival of my cerulean blue thirty-five-litre women’s Gregory Inyo backpack.  I am thinking I should have ordered the forty-five-litre, but it is what it is.  I am also awaiting a lightweight pair of Sanduk loafers for evenings at the albergues when my boots will be drying. 

My U.S. passport arrived today!  Except for the Dennis the Menace hairdo in the picture, it is pretty cool.  I had actually had a somewhat pretty passport picture taken with fresh makeup and great hair, but, after having been sucked up and spit out by a wind monster between my car and the U.S. Post Office, Melissa, the wicked postal agent who reviewed my passport application, informed me that the photos I had submitted were too large and could not be used, but that, being my lucky day and all, for “just $15.00” I could have her take wretched, I mean new, ones, which I ever-so-appreciatively asked her to do toot-suite.  After feigning a few niceties, Melissa looked at my hair, grinned, snapped new photos, attached them to the application, and sealed up the package.  When I got to the car a few minutes later and saw my crested auklet hair-plume in the rearview mirror, I, true to form, over-spiritualized the moment by telling myself that the Camino Frances truly must be beckoning the “Real Me Without Affectation."

Oh, my sweet dad.  I had not thought this journey would be about him, yet he seems to be pervading every aspect of my plans.  He is in my thoughts when I am strolling down the camp-gear aisle at Scheels, when I am rolling up my rectangular sleeping-sheet-bag-thing on the sun porch, and while I am practice-hiking near Taylor Creek.  I watch him study the constellations from a lawn chair on a clear, crisp night.  I smell his camp coffee and see him frying bacon and eggs in his cast-iron pan over a campfire near a New Mexico river.  I kneel beside him on his navy goose-down mummy bag, flattening then rolling it just so.  Oh, that bedroll, chuckle, chuckle, chuckle.  I remember warming up to ask him if I could borrow it for a sleepover one Friday night.  “Hey, Daddy,” I said, “Where’s your old sleeping bag?” to which he answered with a sideways grin and his blue eyes a’ twinkling, “My old bag?  Ah, she’s back in the bedroom with the pup.”  He loved to deliver a goofy punch line.  Remembering him saying that still makes me smile.  

My disgust with the world’s (and weariness with the Church’s) consensus realities has made me to feel as if I am different.  I may look like I am having a psychotic episode, but really I just am becoming more interested in the spiritual reality behind our sense-perceptible world and am becoming less and less concerned with material matters.  Ah, who am I fooling?  I am a bit off kilter.  I am a forty-eight-year-old woman who is planning to carry a hefty lot of guilt and shame on foot for five hundred miles deliberately as penance, before unloading the whole darned heap-a-hurt on the Camino de Santiago.  That is a little strange even by my standards.
  
I am grateful that Rob understands my need to take this journey.  He knows I have gravid weights from my past that must be done away with for good.  I would not be surprised, however, if he, being the movie buff he is, sees my penance through celluloid and tantamount with, say, Jeremy Irons’ character, in Roland Joffe’s 1986 movie The Mission, who painfully lugs his heavy colonial war armor up the steep side of a mountain as self-punishment for killing his brother in a fit of rage.  

Furthermore, I am pretty sure my dear husband is envisioning me carrying Pandora’s literal Box to the end of the earth and disposing of it beneath a blood-red sky, while demons hiss and peregrinos’ faces melt from their skulls, dripping gourd-and-shell-shaped blobs onto the sacred path.  Whatever it is Rob precisely thinks, please, Lord, bless him for creating the space in our lives for such a pilgrimage and for welcoming the ebb and flow of our earthly trials and tribulations to play out against the backdrop of spiritual purposes which transcend this mocked-up world.

Yesterday was hard, trying to explain to my family why the heck I want/need to do this.  I, of course, did not say that the Camino has “called” or “summoned” me.  That would be kooky.  But it kind of has.  Most of my family members are worried and confused; a few get it and are unbelievably supportive.  My son Adam admits that he is jealous, and my twenty-three-year-old daughter is sure that I am having a midlife crisis.  If I am, it is one that deserves a midlife solution, as I have reached the point in life when I probably have more past than future and a major overhaul is in order.  Undeniably, years and years of quiet desperation has led me to a turning point-- that opportunity which comes to each of us at some pivotal stage in our life when we are offered time to re-assess our direction.  I am not quick to call this a “crisis,” however, as I imagine a mid-life crisis would cause a breakdown, and this is sure to cause a breakthrough.  I have been aware for awhile that something profound is trying to happen to me, and this awareness is what is giving me enough courage to fly to the other side of the globe and gimp around for miles with a toe missing from a sorry foot with complex pain issues.  

I am getting pretty well organized.  Amazon should award me a Customer of the Week plaque.  I literally gave them $90.00 just for socks.  I’ve gotten Keen hiking boots, a sports watch, a purple rain jacket with neon green ties, light-weight pants that convert into shorts, a little yellow headband, quick-drying t-shirts, an LED flashlight, a small first-aid kit, a tiny clothes line, and $18.00-a-pair moisture-wicking underwear, because one certainly cannot have a soggy bottom while walking the Camino de Santiago.

I revisited Amazon today, looking for a money belt, carbon-tipped anti-shock trekking poles, a headlamp, and earplugs for drowning out albergue snorers.  I was amused that, below the picture of foam ear plugs, under the Amazon Products That Customers Also Bought, were a 300 watt subwoofer, a baretta holster, a Scotch tape dispenser, and a Tomy Screwball Scramble game; as apparently in addition to sub-woofing and shooting, Screwball Scrambling and Scotch taping can be quite deafening.