Setting out…

Today is the beginning of my #flightfree #slowtravel pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela to meet my friend Jeff. Jeff is doing the last 100km of the French Way as part of an ‘Accessible Camino’ trip in a wheelchair pushed by friends. I’ll meet up with him on the day he arrives into Santiago de Compostela and hang out for the weekend. Jeff & I met through work about 15 years ago - my boss asked me to give Jeff a hand with setting up a Belfast visit for a group of young people from a church in Amarillo, Texas where he was the pastor at the time. We seemed to click and stayed in touch, and in the time since I’ve visited him a few times in Philadelphia where he and his wife moved after Texas.

My pilgrimage will be rather different from the conventional kind as I’ll not be doing any trekking but it’s an intentional experiment in European rail travel from Ireland. I treated myself to the book pictured above to get a sense of the possibilities (TLDR: there are many!)

Over the last few years I’ve been getting more clued into the ecological emergency (the ‘Mothers of Invention’ podcast and ‘This Changes Everything’ by Naomi Klein are excellent starters in this regard) so I’m exploring ways in which I can make some changes. I’m not saying I’ll never be on a plane again and it’s not something I’m going to tell other people to do, but I’ve been lucky enough to travel across Europe and to Asia, Africa and N America and I’ve done a lot of flying in my time, so I feel it’s time to shake things up a little bit and explore different ways of doing things. The geek in me used RailEurope’s handy calculator to figure out the carbon footprint as a train passenger for each of my train journeys and when I compared the total with the carbon generated from return flights Dublin-Barcelona and Barcelona-Santiago de Compostela, the train adds up to just 11% of the flights’ carbon output. That’s quite a big difference!

My route is Belfast-Dublin-Holyhead-London-Paris-Barcelona-Madrid-Santiago de Compostela… and all the way back again the same route. Only slightly bonkers… And yes, there’s a spreadsheet! I’m looking forward to being able to take in some of the journey as an event itself rather than just a means of getting from A to B, and to watching the world go by through the train window. I’ve always loved travelling on trains - ever since my first solo travel trip as a 16-year old to Glasgow to visit cousins. I listened to Marc Cohn’s first studio album (remember ‘Walking in Memphis’?) on my Walkman and the track, ‘Ghost Train’ still takes me right back to the excitement of heading off on my own independent adventure as I watched the hills of Galloway roll past.

I’m hoping to post a few updates as I go, I hate typing on a smartphone as I’m much faster on a laptop keyboard, so it will likely be a few photos here and there. I’ve always really enjoyed documenting my travels as I go as a way of savouring the journey and having something to look back on afterwards.

Buen camino!