TRAVEL MEMOIRS
Walking the Camino de Santiago and Kicking Memory Rocks
This old hiker remembers her youth — hold on to the feeling!
Walking Camino de Santiago takes me back to my twenties and thirties, when I climbed mountains and hiked the wilderness. Now that I’m older, I choose smaller adventures. I’ve learned I enjoy my time more if I listen to my body.
I even use walking sticks now, and swear by them. Oh, I would have laughed at someone like me back when I was young! (walking sticks? what? you going skiing with those things?)
The photo above was taken by my first husband, who said, “Go climb out onto that rock! Don’t fall!”
I was thirty-six years old, on a road trip around the USA before returning to Cambodia to start a publishing company. We drove to California, somewhere near the Tassajara Zen Buddhist Center. Ken’s brother was a monk at the time, and we made dinner on the Coleman stove in the forest. We had a good adventure meeting up in the middle of nowhere.
So many memories of the Cascade Mountain range exist in my mind. Seas of green evergreen trees, the snowy caps of The Three Sisters mountains, Mt. Hood, Mt. Shasta in California. We hiked and climbed, set up small tents off mountain trails and made Kraft macaroni…
