Our final shakedown was to arrange our packs, poles, shoes, and umbrella in a large duffel bag and check it all onto a flight headed for Sacramento.
Normally, we don’t check luggage when flying and travel with only carry-ons. However, TSA doesn’t permit trekking poles to be carried onto a flight, and since they are a must have for our walk across Spain, we were forced to check a bag.
The shakedown was a success…the duffel made it to Sacramento and back to Indiana and in one piece. Some wear, but one piece.
With the final shakedown is complete and successful, we are ready for the journey to begin.
We’ve been busy training for our Camino de Santiago trip. Every morning (almost), we get up, grab breakfast, coffee and tea and head out into our neighborhood carrying our full Camino packs and gear. The shakedowns are mostly done at this point, but conditioning is still needed for for the 562 miles (900km) to come. At this point, though, we are both bored out of our minds! The same routes, the same streets, the same sidewalks and paths. We’re over it!
Earlier this week, I told Kara I am ready for these walks to “count”. I want to be on the actual trail making actual progress toward Santiago rather than waiting for our tracking app to tell us we’ve hit our mileage goal for the day. I want to be practicing my Spanish with albergue hosts and restaurant staff. I just want to start already. We’re in the dog days of summer and training is all we can do. Our plane doesn’t leave for a few more weeks, so we keep walking and walking and walking. We’re gutting it out, but every day is “leg day” and it it has stopped being fun.
We are as ready as we can be at this point. We know the Pyrenees mountains the first couple days will kick our butts. But in glacier-flattened Indiana, the only hill training we can do is a set of stairs near an overpass by our house (we desperately miss the mountains of California). We plan to take it slow over the Pyrenees. There’s no need to go too fast too soon. Our plan is to push through the first two days and ask our bodies for forgiveness later.
We’re less than a month away from our start date. It can’t come soon enough.
“When Plan “A” fails, remember there are 25 more letters.” – Unknown
Those who know me know I am a planner, thinking of all contingencies and creating checklists. This has served me well in both my working and personal lives. Rex is a planner too but doesn’t tend to get bogged down in the minutiae (he leaves this to me). My goal as we head into retirement is to let go of some of the micro-planning tendencies to give room to a new “the universe will provide” mindset. If anything, it will be an interesting experiment to see if it is possible.
Yesterday as I was scrolling through my Facebook feed, I saw a cry for help on one of the Camino De Santiago Facebook groups I follow. The poster mentioned the bus route from Pamplona to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port (SJPP) that Rex and I were planning to take is being suspended effective September 5th. We were planning to take this bus on September 6th to our starting point.
After a second, mild panic rose within me. “OH SHIT!” We have to find a new way to get from Madrid to SJPP.
I had promised myself (and Rex, so there’s no backsies) I wouldn’t over-plan the trip and make too many reservations. We both agreed the climb over the Pyrenees needed to have beds confirmed in advance, so we had our first two nights lodging reserved, but nothing else. We were going to “go with the flow” and figure things out as we went along.
New research began immediately. What alternate routes were there to get to the start? This cancelled bus kicked off a chain reaction of changes. Since we had already booked our stay in Madrid, SJPP, Orisson and Roncesvalles, we were searching for other transport methods into SJPP for our original planned Camino start. But after over an hour of research, we realized we had to come at this problem a different way. We decided our best course of action was to throw our original dates out the window and book the trip two days earlier so we could catch the final bus to SJPP on September 4th instead of September 6.
Now the worry begins as we anxiously await responses back from the hostels confirming if they can switch our dates.
Fingers crossed Plan B works out and we can continue to focus on our very long pre-journey checklist.
05 Sep 2022 Update: After several days of sleepless stressed sleep, finally all hostels aligned and were able to reschedule our stays. What a relief! Plan B worked!!!
We need your help to get funky on the trail by building our The Roaming Rountrees-Camino Playlist on Spotify. We hope you can listen to the playlist buy pushing the play button in the upper left corner below. If you have Spotify, the playlist is public, so you can search for it and like it to listen along with us.
Rex and I love all genres of music and are looking for songs to inspire and motivate us. So, what songs inspire and motivate you? Feel free to add as many as you like. We hope you will like this collaborative playlist and listen with us as you are walking in nature (or anytime).
Guidelines
Add songs of any genre, from classical to heavy metal, from movie themes to opera. Add songs that you can’t help but sing out loud whenever you hear them. Add songs that make you work out harder, dance in public, get the house cleaned faster, or in general shake your groove thang. Add songs that make you feel stronger and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.
Send us the song title and artist’s name…
All you need to do is give us the song and artist’s name in the comment field below and we will add them for you. Or you can use our contact us page to share your musical inspirations.
We appreciate your help with this! We are excited to be motivated by you while we make our way to the cathedral in Santiago.
“Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything.” – Plato
After scrutinizing every item in my pack multiple times for redundancies to cut precious ounces, I’ve finally settled on the gear list I plan to carry for our 57-day trek from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. Kara shared her list already. Now it’s my turn.
The workhorse will be my Gregory Paragon 48L pack. This is my first experience with a Gregory product, and I have been very happy with it so far. It fits me well and easily holds all my gear. I still have some work to do to optimize the packing and unpacking needed each day, but I suspect I’ll fall into a rhythm once on the trail. So, what made the cut?
Gearlist
Backpack and rain cover Backpack liner bag Lixada water tube Trekking poles Head lamp Small pocketknife Blanket Sleeping sheet/liner Inflatable pillow/Pillowcase Eye mask/Earplugs Sleep shorts/Socks iPhone Computer Chargers/Cables/Adapters Apple AirTag Headphones Charging battery Microfiber towel Shower shoes Toiletries Lip balm First aid kit Sunscreen Naproxen/ibuprofen Packing cubes
Hiking shoes Shoe inserts Short sleeve shirts – 3 Zip off pants Shorts Belt Long sleeve pullover Rain jacket Socks – 3 Underwear – 3 Baseball cap Sunglasses Reading glasses Hiking sandals Hiking sleeves Gloves Buff Bandana Fanny pack Wallet/cards/cash Passport Camino credentials Compression sack Carabiners Rock
After packing it all up, the final dry weight (without water and food) comes in at 19.6 lbs. / 8.9 kg. I’ve carried heavier packs on previous backpacking trips in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, but those were only 3–4-day trips. This will be 57. I am happy with everything in my pack for now. It seems like the right balance of “need” vs weight. We’ll see if that changes once we hit the trail.
Striking a balance
I know I have some things others would think are unnecessary, but I’ve done this consciously in an attempt to strike a balance between weight and comfort. Hiking this long will come with a lot of monotony and there will be days I’ll just want to push through and “embrace the suck” as they say in the military. Those are the days I expect to be grateful I didn’t whittle everything down to the absolute bare minimum. But then again, if the weight really starts to be a burden, there may be a few donations made to hiker boxes along the way.
Other than the computer, which we decided we needed to bring for various reasons (and I drew the short straw to carry), what would you say I either overpacked or forgot to pack?
Only 48 days until we hit the trail. It’s getting close now!
