The walking has been a great experience. I would have thought after 13 years of walking we would be going on a lot of similar landforms but no, nature has a way of exciting us with new eye-bewildering landscape. On the Iberian Peninsular there’s a lot of rain so it highlights the varying green grasses carpeting the glorious open fields of more shapes and designs than ever before. You might see all sizes of [...]
Walked pilgrim track from Santillana del Mar towards Orena. Just to revise, we are going back and forth along parts of the pilgrim track which are the most thrilling to travel on, and because we had trouble early we were late with everything and a little disorganisation goes a long way. The reason we are not walking the full track is because we recently changed to account for my first day which scared me. [...]
From here on, the steep jagged peaks of the Picos de Europa have separated themselves from the great mountains of the Cantabrians that lie in a few regions of Northern Spain. The region where we mostly bore witness to them, was the Asturias. These ranges are particularly prone to weather changes because of their proximity to the sea and although we witnessed these daily, they were not as extreme as they would have been [...]
Well, it took an Englishman, his beautiful Collie and Healer, and some luck to get me back on track with the posting. The 5 of us stood on the cliff-face of Ribadesella talking about anything other than technical issues. He had been living with his wife and dogs, with Los Picos de Europa on one side, and the cliffs of Ribadesella on the other. In his words, it was the best of all worlds. [...]
By the way, our trip has been productive in other ways. This has allowed me time to do the ten core exercises and osteoporosis exercises, followed by speech therapy. Then there is the reason I am mostly here for, and that is to help bring awareness of Parkinson’s by walking 10-15 kilometres a day. The path has changed as we revert to previous methods of walking (in this article’s case we won’t be walking [...]
So we were off on a wet day and the forecast was for a week of rain but no concern, we were on our way.The forest birds were there because no trees were getting chopped so they were our friends. It was a busy route because it is a challenge and this was obvious on the numbers. We soon left the bitumen, but the track was one where we needed to focus our attention: [...]
We return to Spain a little wiser, a little creakier, a grown up Parkinson person (PLWP) — still alive, still walking, but Parkinson is bringing more friends to walk with us. Some tip toe around me so I chant ‘heal first’ and like a Collie dog it obeys. Some stop me all together so I change direction and sing: “ these boots are made for walking……and they agree. I’m starting to lean to the [...]
We were in the foyer when Tom came up to me and said: “do you want to come to a poetry reading”. This was totally unexpected because I was concentrating on the final kilometre goal. I get very excited when I hear the word poetry though. Uncertainly he looked at me, partly I suppose because my medication hadn’t taken hold. More certainly he said: “Would you like to read a poem”. “Yes, I’d love [...]
Raining as we left our little room in Stavenger. In Norway we really didn’t need to deal with the weather let alone a war. A couple of Ukrainians embraced and cried, as one recognised the other after years at war. The Norwegians didn’t seem to mind as two people hugged each other, and the crowd clapped. We left in the glorious rain and I say glorious because when it’s happened we welcomed it eg [...]
We completed the other hills on the western side by sidling up to them with no more than a glance to thank them for diverting large expected rainfall away from Bergen. Mountains can do this I believe, in the form of Orographical rainfall. We slowly turn the big boat around, and through a Sydney Harbour size fjord with small islands creating a guard of honour until we let loose one side and no longer [...]
