Trying to keep the Camino alive

Right! So it’s been one month since we arrived back home to Sydney after our adventure abroad.

It was time to live our “normal” lives again ad try to put a bit of what we learned into practise. And have we? Yeaaahhhh….. of course!

Every day, we seem to experience a little something that reminds us of the Camino; a snail, a butterfly, a story about a Templar Knight, an email from one of our Camino pals. Nothing is “just” what it is anymore.And yes, we do want to relive the Camino moments again. Will it ever be out of our blood and bones? We hope not!

Yesterday, we picked up our framed passports and certificates and now it is hanging proudly on our wall. We can relive those moments daily now!

But before we had this on our wall, in an attempt one weekend to take us back to those days, we watched the movie “The Way” starring Martin Sheen.

Before we had even left for Europe, everyone was raving about how we should watch the movie before we go. And then on the Camino, people talked about the movie so fondly. But we didn’t want to see it until after our Camino. We wanted the Camino to be an experience without any preconceptions. We were SO glad we didn’t watch the movie before we left.

Were we disappointed? Most definitely. We felt it was rather an inaccurate portrayal of the experience. Maybe we were fortunate but we never met a single pilgrim that was so negative, cynical, rude and disrespectful as the ones portrayed in the movie. With all due respect, we get that the movie needed to have some sort of “drama” but we felt it was too over the top.

We don’t even want to go into detail about the other inaccuracies of the movie. The characters were enough to make us cringe. Maybe we should’ve watched the movie before we left after, we would’ve been pleasantly surprised.

BUT we will admit that the scenery was accurate. It did make us nostalgic.

Looking back at some of our photos, it still takes our breath away. These are some of the photos we shared on our travel blog.

**A big sigh**

Eventually we need to let go of our Camino feelings. Why did it feel so good?

We’ve got to keep the momentum going with maintaining those positive feeling and energies in our every day!

So far … so good 🙂

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Putting our words to practice…

Where do we go post-Camino to have a break and relax? We go to Paris, where else? And moreover, we are hoping that the lessons we have learnt on the Camino have stuck, and where else to practice than a city with 2.2 million people and where 27 million tourists come to visit a year.

Yes, culture shock straight away but this time, we see this city in a completely different light to what we did pre-Camino! Our biggest thrill was getting to eat something that wasn’t “Menu del dia” (i.e. Menu of the Day). We had lots of choice now gastronomically 🙂

We took a day trip to Versailles & you could describe it as a day riddled with challenges that normally we would’ve acted differently. But with only less than a week since completing our Camino, maybe we have faced our first chance to practice what we learnt!

Today we got rained upon, we got blown away, we had to line up for over 2 hours, we were surrounded by hundreds of people squeezing through tiny doorways and we had our train cancelled and needed to find another way back to the hotel.

Not once did we lose our cool and not once did we utter a negative comment and not once did we resent the situation we were in. Hopefully, we are beginning to realise that the negative reactions creates nothing else but pain for ourselves. And why would we choose to do that?

All the while, we accepted the situation we were in and carried on. We saw lots of other emotions in our fellow travellers and we just knew which ones we wanted to be – the happy and carefree ones that don’t let these type of things spoil their experience. Because until we can learn that this is part of the experience, we will never really be happy.