WHO ARE WE?

Who we and What are we doing?

Sally and Liisa are two wandering friends who met just a few weeks back whilst walking the Camino Frances. Liisa (having hitch hiked the ridiculously long journey from her home townTartu in Estonia to St. Jean Pied de Port) was walking the Camino Frances accompanied by Martin the guitar and his very heavy case, looking to rediscover her creativity which had been stolen by a series of unfortunate events. Sally, also looking to locate a long hidden creativity she vaguely remembered possessing a couple of decades back, was on her third Camino Frances of that Summer/Autumn having developed a habit of walking it over and over for no particular reason since leaving her teaching post in her home town of Birmingham, UK.

The girls met one early morning in Ponferrada, a magical town with snow capped mountains and a fairy tale castle, as they left the municipal albergue. A brief ‘Fancy coffee?’ turned in to a day’s walking together, a night’s drinking together, a shared hangover and a beautiful friendship. From Ponferrada the two walked side by side all the way, only separating to briefly obsess over inspiring muses and potential love interests, before entering the great city itself, Liisa singing the Buen Camino songthrough the ancient streets en route to the magnificent cathedral.

The two parted company to return to their home towns in mid December and simultaneously realised their great mistake , Liisa whilst shivering in the darkness of Estonia’s cold, black winter, and Sally whilst confronted by the materialistic furore of a Christmas obsessed crowd of happy shoppers. Acknowledging they were both heading toward a dark, bleak tunnel of despair, Liisa packed in her day job and took a flight to Birmingham, where both girls plotted their escape with a vague plan to walk, and walk, and maybe walk some more, whilst writing, playing and singing all the way, free from snow, consumerism and expectations!

We are free and we’re out of here!

What are we doing?? We’re taking a year out, maybe more, maybe forever, maybe just shy of forever, and we’re going to walk the Camino. Not one particular Camino, but lots of Caminos, maybe every Camino we can find… Everyone walks their own Camino in their own way and that’s cool. We’ve met people who do a week every year for several years. Many walk the last 100 km from Sarria to Santiago and feel a great satisfaction and joy. But having done a few Camino Franceses between us what we have learned is we love it and we want more! We have developed a relationship with it, and now we’re getting serious. We’re past the dating stage with Camino! We want more commitment! More intensity! We’re going to try living together with Camino for a while and see how we get along. I mean, how well do we really know each other? A few months together over the last couple of years isn’t such a long time…. We’re taking our relationship to a new level….  We hope lethargy doesn’t set in Camino, We hope we don’t take you for granted. We hope your annoying irritations don’t start to grate on us or your friends annoy us. We hope we do not become disillusioned with you and start thinking we were not so great together in the first place. Because right now we love you and we’re excited about living with you, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and health, until death do us part and we find ourselves supping vino tinto with Saint Santiago himself (or we run out of cash and need to dip a weathered toe back in to the real world) 🙂