Santiago, mi amigo

A while back, my mom and I saw a movie called "The Way", about a disillusioned middle aged man whose son dies on his first day on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. So this man decides to complete the pilgrimage to honor his late son, and along the way, he meets fellow travelers and experiences things that change him completely. The film starred one of my favorite actors, Martin Sheen, and his son Emilio Estevez as the son who dies early in the movie but appears throughout the film both in flashbacks and in sort of ghostly images of people that somehow remind Sheen's character of his son. At the end of every movie, I wait to see if it was based on a book, and if so, I usually try to find that book and read it, especially if I loved the movie and hadn't already read whatever book it was based on. "The Way" was roughly based on a book called "Off the Road: A Modern Day Walk down the Pilgrim's Route" by Jack Hitt. I recently read this book and found it quite compelling, so now I am reading another tale of walking "the Camino" called "The Year We Seized the Day" by Colin Bowles and Elizabeth Best, two Australian writers who barely knew each other at the outset of their journey. They experienced great adversity, hardship, blood, sweat and tears along the way. I'm not quite done with the book and am at the point now where they are just about to finish the trip and enter Santiago. It will be interesting to see how the book ends. I find myself now wanting to do this journey despite all the hardships experienced by the writers who've chronicled it in the books I've read. I am at a point in my life where I feel more than ready to turn the page, but not sure what that's going to mean and I kind of want to test myself to find out who I really am after so many decades of working in the same job. I suppose you'd have to train for such a long walk and I don't know how you'd do that, but it sounds like something I would love to try doing. Unfortunately, it also sounds like you have to be independently wealthy to afford such a trip, so I rather doubt that I will ever have the chance to make it, but...it doesn't hurt to dream about doing something like this someday.