A New England. ♩ was 21 years when The Boy was bor♬ . . . ♪'m 70 now but I won't be for lo♫ g. In 2004, I'd just turned 50 and retired [retire early and retire often has been my lifetime strategy] and announced that I was ready for a long walk in Spain. The Boy did me a solid by saying he'd komm mit. We pulled into Santiago on The Day:
Looking [too] closely, it is apparent that the older man is still portering 10kg of lard. That had all gone by the time I arrived, 800km later, at St Jean Pied de Porte in September.
This evening we're meeting in Bayonne 64 with the intention of walking North a piece out of St Jean along the GR65. That is one of the many sentier de Grande Randonnée which criss-cross Western Europe in a largely car-free network of walking routes. GR65 is the French section Chemin de Saint-Jacques aka Via Podiensis and starts / finishes in Geneva / Santiago. In 2019, I was getting ready to retire [retire early and retire often has been my lifetime strategy] in the Summer of 2020. I fantasized about walking from St Jean to Cherbourg as the third and final stage of my 25 year walk from the furthest tip of Portugal to Home. Coronarama put the kibosh on that but my plan was taken aboard by The Boy who said he intended to komm mit agane.
Ho Ho, he is now the age I was in the photo above and much fitter so def'n'y able for a 150km yomp along a waymarked sentier. Me, maybe not so much: I've been moaning that it's 5 years too late for me. But, as I mentioned a tuthree weeks ago, I've been in training for a month, and can now "sprint" 2km up a 10% slope in less than 25 mins. That's only vaguely related to being able to keep going at that pace for 30km. We have dinner booked on Saturday that far away from St Jean - so my knees had better be good enough. Ultreïa!? ♬ ♪ ♫ ♩
Blob posts will be patchy to absent!
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