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May 20th – May 30th, 2016

So we took the bus from Burgos to Leon. With a bunch of other guilty looking peregrinos. But whatever man, you can do your camino however you want. Right?

Moments after I took this picture the bells in the enormous church right behind us started frantically ringing, and then a HUGE crowd gathered right behind the sign. They were carrying candles and giant crosses and all sorts of stuff, and then when they’d filled up the whole block they all walked very slowly and quietly into the church. It was intense!

The next day we had an amazing chocolate breakfast feast, and then caught the train to Sarria, a town about 100 km outside of Santiago. 100 km is the minimum distance you need to do to be able to get your Compostela if you are walking (or on horseback). If you bicycle, you need to do 200 km minimum.

At this point we were coordinating with Annukka (Cassia’s mother-in-law), who was on a roadtrip in Galicia, so we would arrive in Santiago around the same time as her. The timing worked out so that we only had to walk average 15 km/day, which was very nice and relaxed.

We stayed in one “town” that had a population of FIVE. They took very good care of us.

We almost got stuck staying at a Jesus albergue (with mandatory prayer time, a 1hr Jesus movie, God dinner, God games, and God breakfast), but I put my foot down and said I would rather walk 80 more km if we had to, and we awkwardly escaped. Thankfully there was another regular albergue just a bit further down the path.

The whole camino you just follow the trail of shells and yellow arrows. This one was bigger than average.

One of my favourite dinners: pulpo (boiled octopus with salt, olive oil and paprika), Galician soup (kale, white beans, pork), and Galician cheese.

A bit of a fixer-upper!

The biggest cheese plate ever. I think it was 5€. The cheese was mild and tangy and soft, like havarti. We put half of it in a ziplock bag and ate it the next day on our sandwiches.

We had pretty good weather our whole camino. Besides the second day when we got rained on a bit, the rest of the time was about 15 degrees and cloudy, which is perfect for walking. Then the last two days of the whole experience it POURED. It was horrible. 20 km x2 in non-stop rain. Hands and feet looked like raisins.

I was clearly LOVING LIFE. This is Scott’s favourite picture of the entire trip.

Finally we arrived in Santiago de Compostela. And it was sunny. The church was large and in charge.

We had had lunch pinchos while we waited for Annukka. The cheese on a stick was amazing, and I was thoroughly entertained watching the Navaja (Razor Clam) ooze out and suck back into their shells.

It is important to carry your pilgrim passport all the way along the camino. In order to stay in an albergue and get the pilgrim price (5-10€/night) you have to produce your passport to get stamped. And then in order to get your certificate at the end, you need at least 1 more stamp per day, for at least the last 100 km, which you can get at cafes, churches, shops, bars etc along the way. Then when you finally get to Santiago they inspect your passport at the pilgrim office and if you pass you get your Compostela, a fancy Latin certificate (that also apparently guarantees your entrance to heaven).

We did it!

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Real Talk: we only walked about half of the Camino de Santiago. 400 km out of 800 km. I had every intention of doing the whole thing, but when my feet got destroyed and every step felt like being stabbed in multiple places, we decided to take the shame-bus for a bit in the middle.

Which happens to break my recap into two nice chunks. So here is Part 1.

May 10th – May 19th, 2016

St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port, France, one of the most popular places to start the Camino de Santiago. We made the last train of the day there with literally 1 minute to spare. The train was only one car long, filled with nervous peregrinos. Some more interesting than others, ex. the guy who bought the wrong train ticket and was pronouncing it SAINT-JEEN-PIDE-DE-PORT, and the lady who already faceplanted immediately after getting off the train because her boot lace hooked onto her other boot. I hope their caminos improved from then on.

The first day of walking. The first stage of the Camino is probably the hardest one, because it’s climbing about 1400 metres of elevation, then a very steep downhill, over 25 km until the first big albergue. I knew that was going to be really hard for me, so I booked us beds in Orisson a few weeks ahead of time. That way you break the climb into 800 m/8 km and 600 m/17 km the next day. I’m so glad, because then it didn’t matter that we had a late start (due to waiting for the post office to open to mail some stuff to Santiago) and that I had to stop 800 times to catch my breath (and enjoy the amazing views). Orisson does a group dinner too where we met lots of nice people that we would continue to meet over the next couple weeks.

We crossed into Spain on day 2. We had to break out the ponchos over the next couple days, and there was still a bit of snow! The steep downhill sections were painful, but at least they are less tiring than uphill. Calves felt like rocks.

At this point you start to get used to the routine: wake up early, walk, breakfast, walk, lunch, walk, find an albergue. Shower, do laundry, rest. Group dinner. Early to bed. REPEAT!

If this wasn’t made out of such flimsy plastic it would have made the best walking stick ever.

Civilization! Pamplona is the first “big” city that you walk through. We went to Vodafone to get a SIM card and the sales guy was the nicest person ever. He wrote out recommendations for albergues and 2 great pinchos (tapas) bars. We went to one for lunch and the other for dinner and they were both really nice. We had things like cheese-filled crispy balls, crab dip, tuna casserole puff, and toasts with stuff on them. The one in the middle of the picture had a huge slab of goats cheese, tomato, walnuts, raisins and candied jamon slices. Wash that all down with a 2€ glass of vino tinto, if you please.

I started getting blisters on about Day 5. :( In retrospect, I should have just worn comfy Nike’s or sandals, instead of heavier hiking shoes.

We walked over some pretty epic bridges. I can’t believe some of them are like 1800 years old! That is amazing! Some of the small old towns were so so so cool.

Favourite foods at the moment:

  • Breakfast: fresh squeezed OJ, tortilla (Spanish omelette), croissants, cafe con leche
  • Lunch: bocadillos, especially a really fatty jamon, tomato and oil one we got at a bakery
  • Snacks: chorizo, Milke bars, bananas

Free wine fountain! Scott filled up his water bottle a bit for later and it was surprisingly good. Apparently the winery gives out 100 L/day for free. Pretty amazing.

So much walking. Through more beautiful landscape. We were doing about 18-25km/day at this point. Scott could have walked more for sure but I was having major problems with blisters. A Dutch couple told me how to thread a thread through them to drain them, which did help quite a bit. I needed a day off one day though, so I took the bus and Scott walked 30 km on his own.

More pinchos in Logroño. Another city, which was always awesome after a few days of towns with population 20. I found a store that sold Keen hiking sandals, which worked way better. It’s all about keeping your feet cool, I think. New shoes helped immensely, but I still needed to wait for my existing blisters to heal up a bit.

We walked a couple more days through Rioja country, after getting me new sandals, but the blisters were still painful so I was really slow. We started calculating how long it would take if we kept going at this rate, and thought about who we wanted to visit all around Europe afterwards, and then eventually came up with the difficult decision of skipping a bit of the walk.

I think Scott was a bit sad, because he was going fine up until then, but he also didn’t want me to be in so much pain. We figured that if we took the bus and just did a bit of light sightseeing in Burgos and Leon then my feet would have a bit of time to heal up and we could at least walk enough of the last part of the camino to get our compostelas. So that was that.

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May 2nd – May 9th, 2016

Our flight from Vancouver to Glasgow was super cheap. I think it’s because it had a very long stopover in Halifax, which was actually perfect for us because I’d always wanted to take Scott to my old university town. We had enough time to take the bus into town, walk around the waterfront, have lunch with my old thesis supervisors (Kazue and Chris), get candy at the Freak Lunchbox, eat Economy Shoe Shop nachos, climb citadel hill, have a few drinks, and bus back to the airport. Perfect.

We went to Glasgow to visit Scott’s bff Jono and his wife Kirsten. They were awesome hosts. They took us into the Scottish highlands, where we had a wee dram at the Glenturret distillery, haggis neeps and tatties at King’s House Hotel, and took in the scenery in Loch Lomond National Park. It was lovely. Jono also took us around Glasgow itself, where we went into a few museums, ate some really delicious foods, and had a few drinks.

Scott and I went to Edinburgh for a day on our own. The castle was a bit out of our budget so we mostly just walked around looking at stuff and tried to find a restaurant that served homemade Scotch eggs (did not succeed).

Scottish food was something special. Jono made sure I tried everything. Highlights included: the most enormous plate of haggis anyone has ever seen, deep fried halloumi (delicious), macaroni pie (delicious), blood sausage, square sausage (salty!), cold grocery store Scotch eggs. They really do deep fry everything. Nom.

After Scotland we flew to London Stansted, and then took the train for 2 hours for the sole purpose of going to the Jorna Indian Restaurant. If you have not had the pleasure of listening to their amazing theme song, I have uploaded it HERE.

We ordered our food based on the song. Tasty saag aloo, creamy korma, and Peshwari naan. It was OK. TBH the best part of the meal was telling our waiter that we came all the way from Vancouver specifically to go to their restaurant. I think we blew his mind.

The next morning we took the train back to Stansted to fly to France to start our camino!

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Ever since I saw a massive group of friends celebrating a 30th birthday in Fiji I’ve wanted to do the same. I managed to convince 12 people (me, Scott, Rosemarie, Lauren, Natasha, Helenka, Marjorie, Lateef, Lani, Ilyssia, Leslie and Kyla) to rent a beautiful Airbnb place in the Riviera Maya. It wasn’t the easiest thing to coordinate people coming from 4 different cities, but it ended up being SO SO awesome.

Highlights included:

1. The house/pool. The house was perfect. It had everything we needed, enough beds and rooms for everyone, tons of space. I loved going in the pool every morning and evening. Plus we saw iguanas, lizards, coati, and cool birds all right in the backyard! Airbnb win!

2. Snorkelling in Akumal with turtles, barracuda, squids, and more.

3. Empanadas and bioluminescence/stargazing in Puerto Morelos.

4. Collectivo adventures. So happy that we had Marjorie to negotiate on our behalf.

5. Cenotes @ Kantun Chi. I still can’t believe that it was not overrun with tourists. Besides us and Louis CK (seriously) there was almost no one else there! The water was so clear and deep and refreshing. I absolutely loved it.

6. “Exploring” the Tulum ruins. Not really. It was too hot.

7. Cooling down in the ocean. Thanks Lauren! 😜 Swimming was so so good.

8. Tulum beach was amazing. Brad and Marita met us there. Brad’s wedding ring fell off but after 20 minutes of diving Natasha actually found it! It was amazing.

9. Just general horsing around with friends. This picture was immediately after trying to take a multi-person water jumping picture. You may have seen some of them on Facebook already.

10. El Fogon x2 because it was so tasty. We ordered a giant platter for everyone to share. Thank you Scott for going out to pick it up both nights!!! Tacos, meats, cheese, nom nom nom.

11. Rose and Lauren’s new nicknames: El Baño and Señor Baño. Also Dukoral. It definitely seemed to help prevent ‘gastrointestinal distress’ in those of us who took it.

12. Helenka’s jesus lizard impression. It is accurate!

13. The group. 😊 I had so much fun with everyone. Thanks guys.

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Dad, Rosemarie, Scott and I roadtripped to Listowel, to squeeze in some visits with grandma and grandpa, Aunt Joanne and Uncle Terry, and Maggie and new baby first cousin once-removed Violet. It was a quiet visit, because my grandma isn’t feeling well at the moment, but full of good chats. Rosemarie and I decorated grandma’s lawn dolls for Paddyfest.

Then Rosemarie, Scott and I bused to Toronto for more famjam. We had dinner with Auntie Hsi and Auntie Pai and Uncle Norman, and then the next day we had lunch with grandma and grandpa Chi too. Unfortunately grandma is not doing very well, but thank goodness grandpa seemed great. One cool thing is that I am now re-connected with my aunt and cousin who live in Germany and now we’re going to try and visit them while we are in Europe!

We visited the Steamwhistle brewery with Dylan O, and then went on a DIY cider crawl (with an epic ice cream sandwich stop — I had Froot Loop icecream with a chocolate cookie). Scott and I couchsurfed with Zsofi and Dylan D (who are doing awesome things these days!!) and Janine and Tony (so nice to see her again after so long, and to meet her fiance). Thank you for letting us crash with you, it was great.

Scott and Rosemarie flew back to Vancouver to go to the Rugby 7s and I went back to Ottawa with dad. They dressed up in stingray costumes and flags and cheered for Australia and Fiji in Vancouver, and I squeezed in second visits with Natasha, MEP and Paul, more eating, and more Brier curling watching with dad and Kate.

It was sad saying goodbye to dad at the airport. :'(

I imagine we will come back to visit next next summer. Like July 2017ish.

And now I am in Whistler. I got the bad news while I was still in Ottawa that my skeleton sled was broken beyond repair and that I would have to switch to a new sled if I wanted to do these last races. That sucked (and still sucks). But, I did 2 runs from corner 3 on the new sled on Wednesday, and moved back up to the top yesterday. My first run yesterday was HORRIBLE, no control whatsoever, pretty much every corner terrible. I bit my cheek really hard even with the mouth guard. But then Jane Channell :) helped me check my balance point again and turns out I was off by like 2 inches (which is huge). So my second run went better. Still not great at all, but at least better. I actually got a new top speed on the second run (132.1 km/hr), even with a run full of flaws. The ice was FAST last night.

I’ll do two more runs in official training tonight, and then it’s a four heat BC Championship race on Saturday and Sunday. The tentative plan so far is to take Monday off and go back to Vancouver to do some errands, then come back for Tuesday OT and then race in Canadian Champs on Wednesday. Although we shall see how it goes day by day.