Just a quick update since I haven´t done one in a while...

I had a minor set back a few days ago due to an overworked/ strained achilles tendon. After staying in Cezur Menor we walked 25+ kilometers to Cirauqui where we had a great stay at a little albergue in a small village on a hill.

The next morning we walked through Estrella where we stopped around 9am (after 2 hours of walking) because my achilles tendon was causing some pain. I pushed on a further 12 km to Villamayor where we called it quits for the day. The next morning I put my boot on which only made the pain worse, and the next town was 12km away with nothing in between, but I took some advil and walked on. In Los Arcos I called it quits. Milton walked on and I sat an waited for a bus that I discovered would not go to where Milton and I were supposed to meet. I walked back into the main square where I found some fellow pilgrims who helped me get a taxi. Milton was happy to see me - a few hours late - in Torres del Rio where we spent the night.

The next morning I pushed on with my sore heel but gave up in the first town after 8km of walking. Once again, while we had our first cafe con leche of the day, our pilgrim friends helped book a pension where they would meet up with me after my short bus ride and their 9km walk.
We had a fantastic stay in Logrono. Nice quiet rooms (no snoring of other pilgrims!), a great Spanish meal in the old quarter of town, a visit of a wine cellar (we are now in Rioja - the wine region), and of course tapas for dinner as it was Friday night and everyone is else. I also found time that afternoon to make it into a sports store where I purchased a pair of trekking sandals in which I feel no pain and have been able to walk 50km in so far.

Saturday was a 30km day from Logrono to Najera. It was a beautiful town on the river and all the locals were out enjoying the sunshine. There was a big soccer game on tv - Manchester vs Barcelona, and the whole town was out on a terrace to watch it projected on a big screen at a bar.

We stopped after only 20km today - feeling a bit tired from the 30km yesterday I think - and we are settled in at Santo Domingo de la Calzada for the night.

We are both feeling pretty good and have done a total of 215km so far (in 9 days), and I will continue in sandals while my heel recovers.

We are loving our routine: wake up and start walking between 6-7am, stop after the first hour or two for coffee in a small town, walk on until noon or 1pm (in the beautiful 25 degree weather) when we check in at our destination, shower and clean up, eat lunch, SIESTA!!! and then explore the quaint towns, have beer with fellow pilgrims, dinner and bed by 9pm (10pm is the latest we´ve been up!). A great routine and a great way to experience Spain!

Hope all is well back home. Í´m still looking for a spot to upload photos and I will write again soon!

We are making good progress, but I don´t think any body part below my hips is ever going to forgive me!

On day two we walked from Roncevalles to Larasoana - another 27km day. We have stories to tell about Larasoana, but with only 10 minutes for internet I´ll save the stories for when we get home.

Today we were to walk a short 18km from Larasoana to Pamplona, but when we got there and walked around a bit, we decided we had seen what we wanted to see in Pamplona, and that we would rather escape the busy city, and so we kept on walking.

We knew the next albergue was only 5 km from town and so that is where we are - Cezur Menor We got in at noon and have had a quiet afternoon - we really needed to rest. Our speed is slowing down - we walk like we are 90 years old once our boots come off!

Tomorrow we are hoping to get to Puenta La Reina, about 24km away I think. But we have said we will take it easy as we need to climb over a small mountain to get there, and we may be too tired to go the entire way.

All is well so far, and thankfully, we have no minor or major injuries to report! (just sore legs and tired feet after almost 80km in 3 days!)

We are off to enjoy the pilfrim´s menu for dinner! :)

We made it and survived the first day!!!

It was a long, more than 24 hour journey from the time Emma dropped us at the airport until the time we checked in at St Jean Pied de Port, but we made it! The train ride from Bayonne (near the airport) to St Jean was incredible. It was the little engine that could (a single car!) that chugged up the Pyrenees to the start of our trek. There was a river on one side and mountains all around. All is green and flowering and it was really exciting to be getting to our starting point.

We woke up this morning for breakfast at 7am (after a very sound sleep!), and took our first steps on the camino at 7:25am. We had 27km to travel and we weren´t sure we would make it at more than one point. It was only a 1200m climb, but a very long and winding one, and after 6 1/2 hours we made it to our destination at Roncevalles.

The view was incredible! We started out under cloudy skies, and suddenly at one point, around 11am it got very sunny. It took a few minutes to realize why, but when we looked behind us we could see we had climbed above the cloud level. We did take a few photos (thanks to the point and shoot camera Emma helped me sneak into my backpack - thank you dear partner in crime!), but I´ll probably have to wait until I´m home to post the pictures. We were really happy when the camino trailed off into a wooded area on the mountain - a great relief from the sun at just the moment we needed it. We checked into the refugio, which is much more comfortable and clean that we were expecting, and have already sat down for a glass of vino tino (red wine) at a bar that happend to have a computer - what luck!

If today was the only day we did on the hike we would be satisfied : we had breakfast with a man from Spain, a man from Sweden, and a woman from Hugary. We walked a few hundred meters with a man from Ottawa and his friend from Australia, and we have bunkbeds beside a woman from Hamilton and her nefew from New Brunswick! We saw sheep in green pastures, beautiful (wild?), brown horses with blonde manes on one of the mountain peaks and walked above the clouds - what more could we ask for?!

We did 27km today- 23 of which were uphill, and we feel fantastic! My hip flexors are a bit tired, but our feet are in great shape and out backpacks are causing no strain at all on our shoulders. The downhill part was almost the most difficult part of the day - we were exhausted by that point and our feet really started jamming/rubbing in our boots ( I even took a small break to put on some moleskin as a preventive measure --thanks Deb!). All is well on the camino and we are thinking of all of you back home who cheered us on and helped us get here - thanks for all the support!

More updates as soon as possible. Not sure what the plan is for tomorrow - as far as our bodies will take us I guess!

Love from the camino!
Hasta pronto.

Camino de Santiago de Compostela

My next adventure starts in just 5 days when I take on the 780 km camino frances route of the compostela pilgrimage. Milton will join me for the first 2 weeks of the hike. We fly to Biarritz, France via Paris on May 19th. After landing in the afternoon of May 20th, we will make our way to our starting point in St Jean Pied de Port. And on the morning of the 21st we start walking!

I'll do my best to check in and to post glimpses of my trek here on the blog. Thanks for all the well wishes of "buon camino" from family and friends, and thanks for following me here on the blog.

Here is my favourite website about the camino (and my greatest source of information):
http://www.caminodesantiago.me.uk/

I'll be using the camino frances suggested itinerary on this website as a guideline for my hike, but I can only go as far as my feet are willing to take me and I think the best plan is no expectations or strict schedule to adhere to. As much as I want to do this for the physical challenge, I also want to enjoy my time sipping sangria and eating tapas while taking in as much of the Spanish culture as I can! :)

Hasta pronto!

Surprise Mail ...

Dear Aunt Jean,

This is a special post just for you since you are our #1 blog reader.

We received a very nice surprise in the mail this evening. It seems to have taken it's time getting here - almost two months from the date it was post marked! But like you said in your card, the Christmas cake tastes better with age! I let Milton open it since he receives less mail than I do and boy did he go at that tape with lots of eagerness and anticipation! He tore right through all the wrapping and served himself a large slice of cake and then a second slice before I had even finished reading the card! No time for photos or anything which would have enhanced this blog entry ;)

He doesn't want to share with the Koreans - he doesn't think they will appreciate it enough. We will however have some of our friends visiting this weekend and I'm sure they will enjoy the Canadian treat with us. Thanks for thinking of us and for going to the trouble of sending it all the way to Korea. We hope you had a great Christmas and new year!

We celebrated Christmas again this year with our close friends here in Korea. As always when we get together, it was non stop laughs which help us forget how much we miss our families.

We played lots of silly games, like this one in which you must pick up the box with your teeth and not let your hands touch the ground. A real test of flexibility as the box gets smaller and smaller each round!

Me and two others were the winners - once the box was gone, we had to pick up an m&m from the floor - who knew I had such amazing hidden talents?! ; )

New Year's eve was celebrated among friends as well. We had a theme party at our apartment - beauty and the geek - can you guess who went as what?!

We even got some Korean friends to come out, which is extremely difficult to do when they know there will be only foreigners present. This is a teacher from Milton's school Song Ne and his wife, who have become very good friends of ours. They were quite in awe at what goes on at a foreigner's party - all the mingling, and people helping themselves/serving themselves while the hosts do the same. In Korea, there is one boss or head drinker who dictates what and when people eat and drink. Korean celebrations all take place seated around a table whereas at our party (like all western parties!) most people stood in the kitchen and moved from one conversation to another. It was really neat to share our party with them.

The holidays are over and we are now both teaching camps at school for the month of January - camp is the Korean word for summer school, but we are working away on our vacation plans for February - a trip to Laos and Thailand, can't wait!!! Hope you are all surviving the cold, snowy Canadian winter. You aren't alone --we've had more snow in Korea than I thought possible and it's still coming down!

October School Picnic

Thursday was our fall school picnic day. Our school went to Kangjin - about an hour away from Mokpo. The region is known for two reasons: it produces some of the finest pottery in Korea, and it was home to a very important philosopher.

There isn't much to write about. It was a gorgeous fall day and it was fun to be out of school, but I'm not super interested in celadon and not many of the posters at the philosopher's museum where bilingual so I'm not really sure why he was so famous. He did build some sort of pulley system that helped build a bridge/tower in Suwon.

I didn't take many pictures, but here are a few to show you what my day was like:

I hung out with the kindergartens for the morning and we made some mosaics out of some broken pieces of the famous green pottery in the traditional shape known from this region.

The kinder kids are so cute!

The famous pottery:

I had the great fortune of coincidentally running into the students from one of my online classes. Their school left the island for the day to do the same picnic as us. I recognized them first, surprisingly since I was the one that stood out the most among all the people at the museum! They walked right by me while others shouted and pointed at me, and I chased after them to introduce myself. This was very cool because the students live way out in rural areas, mostly on islands in the most southern part of Korea. The only interaction they have ever had with a foreigner is via Internet and I only get to see them online too so it was pretty special to run into them and be able to talk face to face instead of on the computer screen.

After the ceramics museum we did a little hiking at the former residence of the philosopher (I don't even know his name) and his little mountain was quite a nice place to do lots of reading, studying and thinking.

Getting some fresh mountain spring water after the hike up.

So although the venue wasn't super exciting it was a great day and an nice escape from the classroom :)

I'm a bad blogger ...

Months have gone by and I have not been back to update my blog ... I'm a bad blogger. Shame on me! But I've been too busy enjoying myself to spend that much time updating and adding photos. I've made a resolution to try to be back at least every other week so we'll see how that goes.

There was no entry for August because Milton and I were away the entire month. We spent a week in Seoul exploring the big city before heading to Europe for three weeks. Milton did a much better job than I did of getting back into blogging and posted pictures from our trip. I wont spend an hour retelling my version of the story, but it was an amazing trip full of great sights, amazing food, and good friends. It was enough to convince us that we MUST live in Europe at some point, but we'll make it back to Canada for a bit before that happens!

Our return to school wasn't bad. It was nice to sort of know what's going on and what's expected of us on a daily basis ... as much as we can know that is, with all the craziness that goes on here! We got in several trips to the beach in September too, as the nice summer weather was just beginning! (rainy season had ended and the unbearable humidity had ended by the beginning of Sept.)

Milton and I both took on some extra work this semester too - we are both teaching online English classes 4 days a week. It's demanding a bit more patience that I had expected. Things went pretty well last semester with just the 2 days of online teaching per week, but with 4 classes, the cancelled classes and rescheduling conflicts and the general craziness has doubled (logically)!

The big news for me in September was that I made the final payment on my student loans and I am now OSAP debt free!!! I rewarded myself with a new hobby and a new guitar! I can't do much with it yet, but I'm working on it :)

Other than that, we've just been enjoying the beautiful fall weather on weekends, sitting outside at cafes reading books and writing letters. We're working on a little trip to Seoul for next weekend to get a tour of the DMZ. I will definitely have more to write about after that and hopefully a few pictures to post too.

Hope everyone is well back home and that everyone had a great Thanksgiving. Milton and I had a stuffed, roasted chicken with some Swiss Chalet dipping sauce (sent from Canada!) and thought of all you!

I promise that there will be more posts coming soon!...