Jerri's Introduction

Jerri here with rambling commentary.  Karen is the writer but Beth and I are piggybacking on her blog to keep our families informed while we are gone.  More background information how we came to be doing this.

Last summer (2011), I went to 5 funerals in 6 weeks.  Most were friends who had not yet “finished” their lives, what they might have liked to have done or accomplished.  One memorial, however, was for my longtime friend Martha Ellen (http://obits.mlive.com/obituaries/annarbor/obituary.aspx?n=martha-ellen-loose&pid=153392995&fhid=5988), who was a nurse at the Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Hospital at the UM when I was the medical consultant there.  Anyone who knows my attitude about teens and mental health would immediately realize that there had to be some mitigating force to save lives (mine and the patients’), and that was Martha.  Even when I moved on to other positions, little "Martha comments" would pop up into my head and I’d realize (years later), “Oh, that’s what she was talking about!”  Martha lived a full and exciting life simply because she made it happen herself.

So, the funerals made me think of my bucket list, and the prospect of a sixtieth birthday looming made me realize that certainly more than half of my life has gone by and I still have a long list of things to do.  Via Mom, we each inherited a small amount of money from our sister Carol, who died in 2009.  Beth said she was ready and willing to travel and the number one item on my list for many years has been to hike the Great Wall of China.

Enter my favorite institution, the public library.  I went to a presentation about this very topic; two MSU students had hiked 2,000 miles of the Great Wall.  As thrilling as the story was, I soon realized that

·         they are guys

·         they are way younger than me

·         they speak Chinese

·         there are no easily accessible support services in China,

all of which dampened my enthusiasm considerably (at least for a long trek).

I started looking on the Internet and at the library for other outdoor adventures, and almost every list of “long hikes around the world” included the Camino.  Meanwhile, I started negotiating at work to get a block of time off (a story all by itself) and ended up with about 6 weeks in September and October of 2012.  Skip a bit ahead to October, 2011.  Mom was visiting and I was looking for appropriate entertainment.  My Michigan Theater membership sent me two free passes to a movie premier that was advertised to be about adult family relationships.  It sounded reasonable so Mom and I went, not knowing anything else about the film.

The movie was The Way (http://theway-themovie.com) and the program included personal appearances by Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez, who made and starred in the film.  They talked about their experiences on the Camino and it helped that there was a wildly enthusiastic full-house audience, most of whom had already traveled the Camino.  The whole experience sounded like the prefect solution.

At that point, everything seemed to coalesce, with multiple factors all pointing in the same direction.  I wanted to do a long trek, I had the "just right" 6 weeks off work, my resources all suggested the Camino, and the movie sort of clinched it.  Add in that Carol, who was very devoutly Catholic, would be paying for the trip and would certainly have approved.  And the full name of the Camino is the Camino de Santiago.  Santiago means "Saint James" and, of course, our dad was equally devout and his name was James.

Beth was a pushover, saying yes without asking any details.  I was planning to ask Karen, but then she was sick for so long that I thought she wouldn’t want to try it.  I casually mentioned my concerns about Karen to my brother (Karen’s husband, also a James) in an e-mail.  He answered in about two minutes, saying she wanted to go no matter what!

You may wonder about us as traveling companions.  Well, luckily we all speak some Spanish and I was an exchange student in this part of Spain in high school.  Karen is detail-oriented (Beth and I are not!), a good writer, introspective and, as the parent of 6 kids (5 boys), can roll with the punches.  Beth has a wicked sense of humor to entertain us, can talk to just about anybody ,and does not whine. And I like traveling but also repetitive, boring tasks (knitting, working in the baby clothes factory), so hiking 500 miles seems like fun to me.