And we’re back! It’s been more than four years since our last blog post, and although we have taken numerous trips and gone on several adventures over the years, the busyness of life and the stress at work kept us from maintaining the blog. But our recent major life event gave us a new motivation to resurrect Pandatrot from the dead. What was this major life event? Well… Ashley and I quit our full-time jobs to travel the world full-time! Yep, we ended the lease to our apartment, sold off Nisheet’s car, and got rid of a lot of our belongings, and put everything else into a storage unit.
Picking our first adventure after a monumental life altering event was not an easy task. There are so many beautiful places in the world that we want to visit. Would we visit all the US National Parks? Explore the jungles of Vietnam? Indulge in the culture in Europe? We are still young(ish) and healthy, so we wanted to do something bold, something hard, and something impactful. Then one day, Ashley brought up a pilgrimage that her friend had done a decade or so ago, the Camino de Santiago (Camino Frances). The walk traverses almost 800km (500 miles) across northern Spain. For over 1000 years people hav been walking The Way to reach the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela where apostle St. James (Santiago in Spanish) is supposedly buried. You spend each night at an Albergue which is similar to a hostel, but only the pilgrims walking the Camino were allowed to stay.
The more we researched about the Camino, the more we were convinced that this was the right trip for us. It would provide the physical challenge, a mental space to think, and the spiritual reflection that we were looking for after making a big move. So, we went for it and booked our flight to France!
We then started the process of buying all the gear needed for the walk. After too many trips to REI and reading through countless internet reviews, we picked out our hiking backpacks, walking shoes, quick drying socks and t-shirts, and everything else that we thought was necessary for a long walk like this. We were anxious and nervous, but most of all, we were ecstatic to be embarking on something special… something that would test us in ways we never thought possible.
