Today is the 15th of April, and it is a very special anniversary for me. It was exactly two years ago today that I sat in the Ottawa airport, embarking on what I thought would be a brief adventure, walking across northern Spain on the Camino de Santiago. It was also the day that I last saw my excellent Osprey backpack, full with all the clothing and equipment that I had so carefully gathered over the previous year and which I expected to use on the Camino. As you likely already know, the airline, with remarkable care and concern, took my pack, wrapped it in clear plastic, tagged it, then shipped it off somewhere other than my destination. They are still storing it somewhere, who knows where, for me, two years later. What I had expected to be a personal adventure has turned into a two-year … so far … odyssey of journal keeping, book writing, editing, publishing and marketing, something that I could have had no inkling of, two years ago today. I hadn’t even planned to keep a journal, since I wanted to have a “pure” experience. Now, of course, I am extremely glad that I did, because the journal morphed into a book, A Journey of Days: Relearning Life’s Lessons on the Camino de Santiago. And the book is getting high praise as an inspiration for others. What an amazing experience it has been so far.

To celebrate this anniversary, what I have been doing this afternoon is sitting on a chair in the sunshine in the driveway sifting through the contents of the central vacuum canister, trying in vain to find a gold earring that Carroll thought had been sucked up by the vacuum. After sifting through a large quantity of grey stuff twice, I can confidently tell you that it is not there. By the time I was done I was covered in fine, fine dust and had to strip off, throw everything that I was wearing in the washing machine and go and have a shower. (I WAS wearing a mask to protect my lungs.) Even my sunglasses had to be washed!