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Camino de Santiago – Day 1 – León to San Martin del Camino…

Today was the first day of walking on our 2025 Camino Frances Camino!

We began in León, due to time constraints.

It was a great day to walk… not too hot and not too cold. It looks like we will have a scorcher in two days. We’ll see. Weather reports aren’t always accurate.

I have a recommendation for my Camino friends reading this!

We love the albergue here in San Martin del Camino. It’s called Albergue La Huella. It’s right inside the city limits of San Martin del Camino. Literally. You step inside the town and it’s on the left.

Albergue La Huella, San Martin del Camino.

The rooms are lovely and clean and the Pilgrim meal was just what we needed at the end of our day.

Their meal was €12 for the completo. It came with salad, chicken and potatoes, cake, and your choice of wine, water, or pop. Obviously we took the wine. The vino tinto in Spain is delish and cheap. Options for dessert were cake, yogurt, or fruit.

Some photos of our day of walking…

This is the famous pilgrim statue in front of the Paradore Hotel in León. The Paradore is where Martin Sheen treated his fellow peregrinos to a night of luxury in the movie THE WAY.

I use Google Fit for my step count. Here’s what it tells me I walked today…this was just Camino steps. It came in roughly what I was expecting. One app told us 22km and another told us 25.5km. Keep in mind that this is not a highly accurate km count, as Michael had two thousand more steps than me. It reads differently for different strides.

Tomorrow, we walk from San Martin del Camino to Astorga. This is where we began our 2019 Camino. There’s a beautiful Palace there, built by Gaudi. We did not enter in 2019, but we’ll be correcting that mistake this time around.

Stay tuned! Onward we go. Buen Camino!

Click here to jump to DAY 2 – San Martin del Camino to Astorga!

If you’ve found this post helpful and would like to support this page, you can do so by buying me a coffee! KevinCraig-BuyMeACoffee

While you’re here, I wrote a novel set on the Camino Frances route. You can check it out at Amazon here: THE CAMINO CLUB

Almost Time to Walk the Camino Frances One More Time!

The time for our next adventure is FAST approaching. Michael and I are about to fly back to Spain to walk the Camino de Santiago once again! This time we will be walking from LEON to SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA. It’s all time will allow us to do. So excited to get back to Spain!

I’ve been watching my countdown app for almost a year now and it finally ticked over to UNDER 30 DAYS today!

And at the same time this happened, I received a Google Alert for THE CAMINO CLUB. It is featured in a blog post on BOOKS ON THE CAMINO and I could not be more thrilled to see it in such good company!

The website is TRAVEL BOOKS AND MOVIES. I’m so glad they featured my book in this post because two of my favourite things are 1) Travel Books and 2) Travel movies. Definitely going to be scouring this site for ideas…hopefully I discover books and movies I somehow missed until now.

Here’s the direct link to the article in which THE CAMINO CLUB is mentioned:

Buen Camino: 15 Books About the Camino de Santiago

I’ve read 12 of these titles (plus my own title a thousand times through the editing process), so I’m already excited to have discovered two new Camino titles to explore!

My novel, THE CAMINO CLUB, was a Silver Winner in the Teen Fiction category of the 2020 Benjamin Franklin Book Award.

In just 29 days we will be heading back to Spain…and a couple of days after that we will set out from Leon to walk the beautiful Camino once again. Can’t wait!

If you haven’t read THE CAMINO CLUB yet, now’s the time! Also…check out the link above to the 15 Camino books. There’s some great reads on that list!

 

 

Writing Life Update – Is it Over? Or is it on Fire?

It’s so hard to see the big picture when I think about my writing life. Sometimes it feels almost non-existent. Sometimes it’s on fire. When I zoom in to a specific period of time I think, ‘Oh no! It’s over!’

But when I zoom out I see that it’s a whole world unto itself…and I calm down a bit. It’s those periods when I’m not writing that I gasp and sigh and just KNOW that it’s over.

But it isn’t. I think I might always be a writer. In fact, last weekend when there was a discussion on retirement I made the very blasé comment, “I just see myself writing all day long every day.”

In that throwaway statement I realized that I have nothing to worry about. Downtime is downtime, nothing else.

This week I’ve been working diligently on my unfinished mid-grade novel with the goal of finishing it by the end of the month. I know it’s ridiculous to throw deadlines around like that, but for me they really spur me on to stay on task. I work best under pressure and under threat of deadlines. They become impossible lines in the sand that I must arrive to at the assigned date and time. I learned this method works best for me when I entered my first MUSKOKA NOVEL MARATHON. The deadline at that time was to finish a novel in 48hrs. Spoiler Alert—I DID IT! That first MNM novel was Sebastian’s Poet. It won the BEST NOVEL AWARD that year. 2007. A lifetime ago!

But I digress. I’ve been really enjoying this mid-grade novel. It feels good to be reimmersed in it. That’s the thing about writing fiction. The writer really does get inside the story. You can feel yourself falling into it. Sometimes I think, ‘If I looked up right now, I’d see the surface above me‘ as though I’m under water and softly embraced in another world. One of my own creation. That’s the part I love the most…disappearing and becoming the story I’m telling. Once you feel that, it’s like you spend the rest of your life chasing that high. Every time you get drawn into your own fiction, you reach that feeling again–that high–and thank the universe that you’re still able to experience it.

Happy Writing and Happy Reading!