Whew! That 10days went by quickly.

As most of you know this is not our first Pilgrimage adventure. In fact, for Allison and this will be our fifth. That fact still surprises me.

Some of our preparation steps always include examining maps, looking up tourist spots, physical training and a detailed examination of what we are carrying in our packs. It can all be a little mundane to us at this point, but occasionally I step back and think. “Hey, what we’re doing is actually pretty unusual.”

Here’s a fun list of things we have actually said out loud recently – but I would never have guessed we’d ever say.:

• “Saturday’s hike was pretty easy, it was only 12miles and 1000’ elevation gain”
• “Hey Allison, I’m going to make a quick trip down to Walmart to weigh some anti-perspirant. Need anything while I’m there?”
• “Mark, did you see that email I sent you about those dog toothbrushes that you just mount to the tip of your finger? I wonder if those would be lighter?”
• “Oh look! If we take this route we can spend the night in a Smurf village! Cool!”
• “I wonder how much sweat weighs?”
• “The place actually makes you wash communal dishes as part of your pay. That would be fun.”
• “Two pairs of underwear or three pairs of underwear? Hmmm. I’m pretty sure I can get away with two right?”

I’m sure each of you have had similar conversations at home… right?

Training

This past weekend we took our fourth to last hike. We hiked along the Tanawha Trail alongside the Blue Ridge Parkway. It is a beautiful section of trail with some special overlooks. In fact, if you’ve ever seen a magazine cover that features the BRP, it very likely had a picture of this area. Here are a couple of clips from our hike.

One of the highlights for me was finding and harvesting some “Chicken of the Woods”, a native mushroom that tastes, and has the texture of, fried chicken. It’s pretty strange.

As far as training goes, what remains are a series of three hikes that have become tradition for us over the years. This weekend is our long-distance hike of 20mi at Hanging Rock State Park. This hike is primarily designed to remind me why I don’t want to schedule 20mi legs while we are in Europe. By 20mi, about all of my joints are unhappy and my feet are throbbing. It’s God’s way of saying “Hey Idiot – it’s time to stop!”

The last two hikes are both at Doughton Recreational Area. They aren’t as long, but contain more elevation. I calculated back in 2014 that if we could handle the Doughton Park loop we could handle anything on the Spanish Camino. Well that doesn’t apply any longer, but it remains a prepatory tradition to end our training with this loop.

Back to the VLOG

I hope you are enjoying the preliminaries to our VLOG. I’m getting more practice with the apps as the weeks fly by. Now it is time for you to get some practice too. As I’ve mentioned to many of you, we would really enjoy your comments and questions as we travel. Putting together the VLOG is fun, but also at times hard work. We also get quite disconnected being away so long. Having you participate is really rewarding to me so please don’t be shy. We’d love to hear from you. So, take a practice swing and comment on the Tanawha Trail video if you’d like.

And once again a plea to anyone who hasn’t already done so, please subscribe to my YouTube channel. It’s not looking likely, but YouTube allows for a live-stream if your channel reaches 1000 subscribers. I think it would be fun to live-stream an adventure or two. At this point I think it would take everyone talking to all of their family and friends to push me over the threshold, but who knows right??

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Mark Dowty on YouTube