Documenting Your Travels

Excerpted from Quick Prep for a Slow Walk on the Camino de Santiago by Leslie H Cole

Published by Armchair Dreams Press © 2020 Leslie H Cole Photographs © 2020 Leslie H Cole

All rights reserved. This ebook or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the author, except as provided by United States of America copyright law.

This blog post is an excerpt from a mini-guide I wrote about preparing for a long walk on the Camino de Santiago. While we wait for a pandemic to subside, we can always dream and plan. For the full free content, download Quick Prep for a Slow Walk on the Camino de Santiago.

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The Camino is an internal journey as well as a physical challenge. Whether you’re walking for a week or a month, you’re going to reflect along the way and you might want to share those reflections later with family and friends.  

There have never been more options for chronicling your experience including but not limited to photos, drawings, pen and paper, audio and written journals using tools on your mobile device, emails, and even snail-mail postcards. When WIFI was much harder to come by on the road, I wrote 40 postcards in 40 days to my 11-year-old  daughter. She shared them with me later and I was mortified to observe that in every single one of them I complained about my feet. I regret putting that in writing. 

For better or worse, I often use words to document my experiences. Chronicling events is an important part of who I am, and journals are the artifacts I will leave behind when I’m gone. If keeping records isn’t your thing, don’t do it. Enjoy your days. Commit the journey to memory. Compare notes with other walkers during or after your pilgrimage. Take photos. Paint or draw. Obsessive note taking is not the only way to document and enjoy your journey. 

On my second Camino, I packed a set of watercolors because I wanted to document my experience without using words. Instead, I ended up posting photos on Instagram and pulled the watercolors out of my backpack once when I was feeling particularly guilty about the space they were consuming in my backpack. Painting and drawing are fantastic ways to document your long walk. Just make sure you’ve already established a practice before you devote ounces or pounds of backpack space to the tools.  

If you’re going to write another Camino book, and you would be in good company, look for supplies to take notes that work for you. 

For the tips that I included with Chapter 9: How Will I Document My Camino? and more, download the full free mini-guide: Quick Prep for a Slow Walk on the Camino de Santiago.