From Swampscott to Santiago de Compostela

Last week we visited 5 towns. This week we walked along 5 beaches. It was a beautiful but sometimes cold and breezy day. We started In Swampscott walking along King's Beach. The tide was out and the surf was up with beautiful breakers streaming in. When we reached Nahant Beach we surveyed the damage from the first nor'easter earlier this month. All of the paved path was covered with sand. Some of the sand was not too deep but in other places there is a foot or more. All the dunes have suffered damage too. Some were washed away and all their sand is now across the path. In places the paved path is broken up and beach access points are a mess. And there is an amazing amount of rocks washed up in other areas. But the good news is we saw lots of cleanup activity going on. Bobcats and bulldozers were out shifting sand and trying to clear the path. However, it will be a long clean up and quite some time before the area looks like it did just a few weeks ago.

Recently we had three nor'easter winter storms in a row. The first washed away one of our favorite walks along Nahant Beach. And the last one dumped enough snow that finding places for long walks has been a challenge. Today we put together a walk that combined walking along Lynn Shore Drive, running errands and then repeating the first part of the walk again. In the end we managed to walk 12 miles! You can see our route from a tracking app we used. The route went through parts of Swampscott, Lynn, Nahant, Salem and Marblehead.  These are our shadows as we finished up our walk.

The pilgram's passport or Credencial Del Peregrino is the document that identifies us as pilgrims. We'll get it stamped along the way at churches and restaurants we stop at and where we sleep at night. To qualify as a true Camino we must walk at least 100 kilometers. Our route is 150 miles (about 241 kilometers) so we'll have no problem there. We also need to get our passport stamped at least once a day and for the last 100 kilometers we need two or three stamps a day. Once we reach Santiago de Compostela we present our passport at the Pilgrim's Office and receive our compostela. This is a Catholic certificate which proves we completed the pilgrimage. When we are done our passports might look something like this one.

We've been trying out some of the equipment we'll take with us on our Camino. We just got this fancy new daypacks we'll be using and have been hiking with them to get use to them. Since we are not carrying all our belongings we didn't need large backpacks So far we love them. They have special panels in the back so there is ventilation and your back doesn't get all sweaty. And they have lots of pockets to store everything we might need. You can't tell in this photo but we actually have cans of tomatoes in our packs. We needed to get use to more weight and threw them in before we left the house. This photo was taken overlooking Walden Pond in Lynn Woods . This is a different Walden Pond then Henry David Thoreau’s in Concord.