It's a done deal....

Well, there’s no going back now, no matter what my $38 travel insurance details state. I bought my tickets today. I’m flying out of Dulles on July 8, heading to Paris. I come home from Madrid on August 14. The total cost for the tickets, with the trip insurance, was nearly $1200. I went to www.1800flyeurope.com, which was a pretty decent site. Done deal.

Now that I’ve actually set the wheels in motion, I’m nervous as hell. Excited, I guess, but nervous, too. It bums me out that I’m getting a lot of friction from my mom about the trip. Despite all I’ve told her, I think she still assumes I’m going to be traipsing across the hinterlands of the Iberian Peninsula miles and miles away from any human contact, seconds away from falling off a mountain or into a canyon or being eaten alive by a pack of wild hyenas.

Suddenly, that’s how scary it feels to me, too.

Once I really started thinking about making this trek, I knew that if I backed down from it, I’d be terribly disappointed in myself for wimping out. Though I’m a little shy on training and conditioning (I’m still only walking about twice a week), I’m sure I should be able to do it. I mean, there are plenty of women who do this and are ten or twenty years older than I am. I may not be in the best shape of anyone I know, but I’m far from being in really BAD shape.

Cost is daunting. Though many of the blogs I’ve read claim that this is really inexpensive travel, I have to remember that a 10 Euro night in a pilgrim’s refugio will compute to about $16 or $17 at least…and that’s going to add up quick, even if it includes some meals.

Also, it’s going to require some pre-trip shopping. Thoreau once said, “Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.” As much as I revere H.D.T. and his revelations at Walden Pond, I don’t find that to be true in many areas of life, so perhaps not this one, either. I’m gonna have to drop some COIN on some boots. The sites I’ve used for research say that’s where you should make sure you don’t scrimp…buy the best boots you can find. My brother (the most authoritarian source in my world, ha ha) seconds that idea.

I welcome recommendations, by the way – not only on boots, but on gear as well. Lightweight outerwear, walking shorts (the kind that zip on long pants), the best brand of clothes for multi-weather exposure. It’ll be the north of Spain, from mid-July to mid-August. Best brand of hiking backpack, since I’ll be living out of it for a month (with like TWO sets of clothes…). I have a backpack, but I bought it in 1997 for 60 pounds on a street corner in London, and last summer, the night before I left for California, I found the outer pockets coming off of it and spent half the night stitching them back on. I’m GONNA need a new pack.

Better get serious about the walking…it’s gonna be a long summer.