The Kumano Kodo Nakahechi route (70 km on foot)
May 18-22, 2015 (with Dan)
and again in November 20-24, 2016 (with friends)
Both trips from Takijiri to Nachi Falls via Yunomine Onsen

The Shikoku Pilgrimage (1,120 km on foot, solo):
April 10 - June 8, 2025
From Ryozen-ji, Temple 1, around the island of Shikoku, ending at Ryozen-ji, followed by a trip to Koyasan as well as Kobo Daishi-related sites in Kyoto

The Camino de Santiago (845 km on foot, 60 km by car, solo):
July 11 - August 11, 2025 (from Cluny to Rocamadour)
August 18-20, 2025 (from Lascabanes to Moissac)
September 6-8, 2025 (from St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port to Villava, near Pamplona)
January 21-22, 2026 (from Sarria to Palas de Rei)
January 23-24, 2026 (from Palas de Rei to Santiago de Compostela, but by car)

Okay, I’m pilgrimaged out, folks. My fun meter is pegged, I’m over it, I can’t even, I’m done. It is finished; I expect this will be the last newsletter I’ll write for some time. To make up for it, settle in for some serious logorrhea…

This all started about about fourteen years ago, honestly. Long story short, a close friend of mine who’d always been on the heavy side decided that it was time to change; with time and effort, he must’ve lost about a hundred pounds and by God did he look good. Being kind of a competitive guy myself, I thought, well, I bet I can do that too… so I did. I went from just shy of 300 pounds to just shy of 200 pounds over the course of about three years; by the end of 2014, I barely recognized myself (and also fell completely off the radar when it came to other bears, which was a bit of a bummer), but was feeling healthier than ever before. I did it the dumbest possible way I could think of: straightforward healthy eating and daily walks, starting with 30 minutes around the nature trail across from my office in San Diego, and eventually working up to 60-minute breaks every workday. I hit a snag in early 2012 when plantar fasciitis decided to make an appearance, but good orthotics fixed that up by the end of the summer and put me back on the path I wanted to be on, and things were going well the next year; my very first long distance hike was the Lake Waikaremoana Track at the end of 2013.

My partner Dan began planning to hike the Pacific Crest Trail in early 2014; he left on March 17, 2015 and completed his PCT on August 11, 2015, for a total of 2,597 km walked. That’s right: walked. He did that entirely by himself… amazing. And well, again, being a competitive kind of guy, I wanted to see if I could find something vaguely similar that I wanted to do, but on my own terms (backpacking has never appealed to me; I like hiking, but not for a week at a time in the wilderness with zero creature comforts) - at Waikaremoana, for example, I hired a local company to set us up with comfy tents and food along the way, which was very much my idea of a good time. But where to next? A simple Google search looking for long distance hikes with good food and comfortable lodging turned up the Kumano Kodo, which I’d not previously heard of. Dan took a couple of weeks off of the PCT, I picked him up at LAX, and we flew to Japan and walked it together. I don’t think I’ve ever had so much fun walking - the country inns and hot springs were charming, the food was beyond compare, and the walk itself was challenging and beautiful and I absolutely loved it, so much in fact that I went back the next year with a group of friends to do it together.

Over the following years, I started planning vacations around long walks: the Moselsteig in 2017, the Milford Track (among others) in New Zealand in 2018, the Inca Trail in 2019, the Echappée Jurasienne and chemin Stevenson in 2021, the Haute Route in 2022, three weeks in Burgundy, Alsace, and Beaujolais in 2023, the Rennsteig and some walking in Austria in 2024, and then a bunch of stuff in 2025, shortly after I retired.

I wrote a newsletter entry every day I was in Japan, but once I got to Lyon, France, in preparation to start the Camino de Santiago later that summer, I felt like I didn’t really have anything much to say about it… and I still don’t. Honest. At this point, I’ve spent 37 days walking the Camino de Santiago - that’s 845 km on foot - and I’ve got the certificates to show for it, but I still don’t feel like I have much to say about it.

If there’s anything I like about long distance hikes, it’s a feeling of progress. Every other long hike I’ve done has had some kind of stamp book or other framework that gave me a sense of daily progress; the Camino does not. Heck, it’s not even a single path: it’s a loosely defined network of paths that all end up in the same place, but start pretty much anywhere in western Europe. The object of the exercise is to get to Santiago de Compostela; there is no time limit, no fixed route, no series of required stamps, only a vague requirement that you walk at least 100 km on foot (70 km if you started outside of Spain, somehow) and that you walk the final stage into Santiago, even though that stage itself isn’t strictly defined.

This is all that you see on the path:

Yeah… that’s it. I’d already been walking seven days from Cluny with no credencial - I couldn’t find one in Cluny - and no progress bar, so to speak, other than “okay, keep going and you’ll be there in 1,667 km”. Hm. Yeah, I like to have a goal… one that’s more specific than “just walk another thousand miles or so and you’ll be done with this trek”.

At least the first two weeks were challenging; it was uncomfortably warm and I ran out of water for the first time hiking in my life, but was bailed out by what appeared to be a school campout; I walked over and asked for water, which they graciously shared with me. There weren’t many other hikers on that section, the GR 765; two sisters towards the end, plus a married couple from the Savoie towards the beginning. Just as with other French hikes I’ve done, the routine was familiar: wake up, have breakfast, walk, then check in to your chambres d’hotes, be social and funny for the apero, enjoy a dinner with the other guests, and then fall asleep. Wash, rinse, repeat. I didn’t take notes, alas, so what I remember is little; I’d have to go through all of the pictures to see what memories they shake out; these are a few that come to mind…

Arriving in Cluny and realizing that the famous abbey really doesn’t exist - and not being able to visit the museum due to scheduling

A Canadian themed hamburger restaurant, for some reason

The first B&B was also one of the best; a wonderful sense of freedom, relaxing in the back garden with a Belgian beer and settling in to a comfortable routine

Not finding any kind of restaurant that was open due to summer vacations; eating the first of many ham and butter sandwiches instead as a result

Setting out on the first day, dumbly not going into the tourist information office to ask about getting a credencial (the stamp book thing you should have with you on the Camino de Santiago)

Long, sunny, warm days; lots of signs that you were on the Camino, but no actual pilgrims (I did not meet anyone else on this stretch who was walking more than a few days)

Taking an old, restored hobbyist train line up to a remote town entirely decorated with plywood cacti in preparation for an American country music festival

Sleeping in a ramshackle holiday-camp-style cabin with dodgy ventilation run by two women with way, way too many pets (super friendly, mind you, just a bit much for me)

Arriving at an apartment above a restaurant, hoping for dinner at the restaurant, instead finding the tiniest ptarmigan breast (or something like it) in the fridge instead, then venturing out to a tiny supermarket to find a can of shitty cassoulet to eat instead

Taking a picture of a cat running away from me at high speed

Stumbling across an obscure French wine region that was all Gamay noir but somehow more delicious than Beaujolais

Idly scrolling through Scruff and never finding anyone interesting enough to chat up

Way too many small town bakeries and epicieries and none of them really particularly interesting; the high point was a bear wearing a kind of floral patterned onesie of sorts manning the till

Arriving at a small town after an especially challenging morning only to find the one restaurant in town had sold out of food, then waiting a long time for anywhere to open to buy a snack

A sobbing, chain-smoking daughter showing up unexpectedly to ask her B&B-owning parents for money, hoping that the embarrassment would work in her favor

Not enough cats, never enough cats

Leaving my sunglasses on a picnic table, walking half an hour, then going back to retrieve them (successfully)

Inexplicably, South African hoteliers who didn’t seem to get the memo as to how French B&Bs are supposed to work; they charged €5 for a small glass of incredibly shitty wine with their bullshit lasagna (seriously, folks, do better)

A charming hostess who insisted on making coffee using a siphon (never saw one before, they’re cool!)

And so on and so forth…

After two weeks of the GR765, I arrived in Le Puy-en-Velay, where I’d been before four years earlier at the start of the chemin Stevenson, the massively popular two-week hiking trail that retraces Robert Louis Stevenson’s journey with a donkey in the Cevennes, his first popular book. The town seemed pretty much the same; my hotel room was marginally better this time, thankfully. I made it out to the southern edge of town to visit Decathlon (think French REI, an outdoor outfitter type place) to buy a couple of things as well as a very nice bottle of wine at the supermarket next door. I finally got a credencial at the cathedral, drank my wine, ate my saucisson sec, and got ready for the Camino proper to start the next day - most French pilgrims start here, about 2 months’ walk from Santiago de Compostela.

Reader, I was not amused. Right from the start, my overall mood went from “this is okay, not amazing, but at least it’s pretty and solitary” to “oh good God, why all of these people and man, this is not compelling scenery”. Days tended to involve a lot of traffic - most annoyingly, two guys riding dirt bikes on narrow footpath that was absolutely not suited for engines of any kind - and a heck of lot of conversation, which was mostly not great and not welcome. That being said, yes, there were a couple of times when I did meet interesting people; I even joined a group of older women for a picnic one day, if anything because they were beautiful and French and charming and wanted to talk about everything from careers to cheese to geology: irresistible !

With the change from obscure to mainstream, the lodgings and gastronomy took a severe turn for the worse as well. Some nights were just fine - La Grangette, the first night out from Le Puy, was absolutely amazing in terms of creature comforts as well as food, and my one night in Conques, at La Conquise, was easily one of the most spectacular hotel rooms I’ve ever been lucky enough to rent. However, those were exceptions - and even Conques wasn’t without issue as the food options were limited, alas. More than anything else, my sense of fun was being slowly worn down; by the time I made it to Figeac, with its grotty little hotel room and unimpressive pizza vending machine, I had decided that okay, I needed a break from all of this, so I decided that I’d stop when I got to Moissac a couple of weeks later, take the train to Paris, and then head to Folsom Europe from there.

What can I say? I was lonely and wanted to hang-out with friends. Folsom Europe, in Berlin, is an enormous fetish event; I obviously didn’t have my leathers with me so couldn’t go “dressed appropriately”, but I figured it’d be an amusing challenge. Anyhow: the few days after Figeac grew increasingly challenging due to weather, with temperatures creeping up to the low triple digits again (that would be 40s if you’re using the metric system), which just isn’t at all fun. By the time I got to Rocamadour and found myself in a stifling hot hotel room with crappy food, I called the hotel two nights ahead, booked a second room, and stopped walking, opting instead to take a bus to that other hotel via Figeac. (That bus ride was super fun, too - I really, really had to take a piss for the last half hour of it, not my idea of a good time… but at least I had enough time between buses in Figeac to do all of my laundry.)

That hotel, la Truite Dorée, was thankfully again one of the best hotels I’ve ever stayed at. Mercifully, their AC was working (it was once again 100 degrees out), although everyone did have to sit outside for meals, which was uncomfortable as it was still damn hot long after sunset. But hey: I was starting to feel like I was on vacation again, enjoying delicious food in a beautiful spot. Yay. Throw in a day trip to Cahors - beautiful city, although the damn wine board tasting room was closed - and I was feeling good. I then picked up a cheap rental car, visited friends a bit west from there, crashed a couple of nights, did more laundry, and generally recovered from the trail. After returning the car, I took a bus to a stop a few miles from my next night’s lodging, which was another crappy pilgrims’ joint, this time with no cell service and no wifi - and a bunch of chatty people insistent on making small talk. Yay. :/

Anyhow: onwards! The next day’s walk wasn’t too bad, the temperatures were back down, and the night’s lodgings were fairly good, with better than average food cooked up by a friendly Irish woman. It was also the site of the only injury I sustained on the trail: I had a twin-bedded room… and I somehow managed to fall out of the bed and onto the hard tile floor, injuring my knee. (I must have been half-asleep and had forgotten I was in a narrow single bed, whoops.)

After limping all the way to Moissac, I bought a lukewarm Coca-Cola at an Aldi and settled in to a louche, ornate room in a decaying mansion-like situation opposite the train station. That night, the other pilgrims were a church group from Germany; they were a much-welcome respite from the usual pilgrim scum in that they were serious about it, very friendly, and for once wanted to talk about something other than the Socialist mayor of Paris or, you know, the President of the USA, much to my relief. Dinner was outdoors for half a minute until it started raining, then indoors; the innkeepers were charming, forbade anyone from using formal language, and on the whole I found myself thinking damn: on the last day of the pilgrimage, I finally am enjoying the kind of pilgrimage atmosphere I’d like.

The next morning, I took a high-speed train to Paris, where I didn’t so much save for hang out with friendly bears both local and American, eat a couple of decent meals, and shop for Folsom Europe-appropriate costumery. (I went with a pair of fireman’s pants and brown work boots; those were complemented by a plain white T-shirt I bought in Berlin.) I’ll always have fond memories of sharing a pot of chamomile tea with friendly Frenchman… that was good. And then the next morning, well, I was on the seemingly endless train to Berlin, complete with a long discussion with German immigration police about how long I’d been in the EU and how much longer I was planning on staying, exactly.

Berlin was incredible: I stayed at the same hotel I’d stayed at the last few times, so I immediately felt at home. I quickly fell into a routine: morning coffee with a handsome Australian fella I’d met the previous year there, then lunch with friends old and new, beers at Woof and/or Prinzknecht… as the week went on I kept running into more and more people I knew, so I did fun stuff like borrow leather pants and suspenders for the street fair from friends, drag American friends out to Georgian food… it was super busy and it really, really hit the spot for me. Plus, much to my surprise, at the end of my time in Berlin, I found myself headed out to the unofficial clothing-optional cruisy park near the FKK/nudist swimming pond in a huge park at the southwest corner of Berlin with a friend; I had my only seriously religious experience of the pilgrimage lying outdoors naked, looking up at the blue skies, enjoying the sounds of traffic in the distance, his breathing, the wind in the leaves… and thinking about a kind of continuity in my being there, stretching back for over a hundred years with other gay men having been there as well, with friends, lovers, or strangers… it was a kind of freedom I hadn’t felt before.

Anyhow: what an experience. Even as I was trying to check out of my hotel, another old friend was just checking in on a business trip; shortly thereafter, all of that ahem social activity was starting to catch up with me (think bear flu, kennel cough, or whatever you want to call it when you’ve attend an ahem social event), so that 24-hour-plus train ride to Bayonne, France, including a night in a berth on the train from Paris was starting to sound entirely unappealing… so okay, hello easyJet, why don’t we just fly to Bordeaux instead and figure it out from there instead? Problem solved.

I traded a pair of flip-flops for some nasal decongestant spray - damn, I love friendly Swedes - flew to Bordeaux, checked in to a tatty airport hotel, and considered my options. In theory, I could have taken a bus and train the next day to rejoin the trail as originally intended, but nope, still not feeling up to it, so I found a cheap room in a town called Dax for two nights instead. That room was okay; it was an Ibis Styles, nothing special, but the guy at reception was hilarious and the included half-board pretty much as bad as anywhere else on the Camino, so it felt right. I had an entire day off, so stocked up at Decathlon, had another ham and butter sandwich, and generally did my best to heal up and get ready to get back to walking.

I took the train to St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port and promptly had a very fine Camino experience, the kind of thing you’d hope for, really. The train was absolutely packed with pilgrims; very few of them, it looked like, were au fait with French trains, so I helped a Korean couple stash their bags between the seats as a courtesy - and then one of them whipped out knitting needles and quickly knitted me a small white scallop shell, which was all kinds of generous of them. (Pilgrims wear scallop shells on their backpacks; I still don’t have one myself, but that small knit one has a special place in my heart.) Upon arriving at St.-Jean, I stopped by a tobacconist’s to retrieve a package I had sent there (an official French fireman’s uniform, which turned out to be a little bit too small for me, dang it!), checked in to yet another moderately crappy hotel room, foraged for supper at a local supermarket, and got ready to finish the Camino… or at least the next few days of it.

Yeah, I’d already made other plans to finish out my time in Europe. It was so clear after a month on the Camino that it wasn’t my bag that I hatched a plan to get on a train in Pamplona, head to Madrid, see friends, and then rent a car, heading back to northern Spain to randomly sightsee while sleeping in my prepaid accomodations on the Camino. Now, the first day back on the trail was a spectacular one; I think it’s the most vertical feet I’ve walked in a single day, plus it was intensely windy, but somehow it all went well, I felt healthy and fit and comfortable, and it was sunny as well - it was a good day, even if it ended with yet another crappy meal in a moderately good hotel. The next day, though, was more Camino for me: fairly uninteresting terrain, absolute clots of pilgrims everywhere, and a superficially nice hotel at the end of it, but with an outrageously bad dinner half a mile away as a final insult. The next day, well, I walked until the Pamplona bus line stops appeared, then said fuck it, got on a bus, skipped the last kilometer or so, and checked in to a seriously terrible room in the city center. I had a crappy lunch, took a nap, had some ice cream to celebrate the end of the walking part of my Camino, and headed down to Madrid the next morning.

Madrid was good: I have two close friends there, got to hang out with each of them, and as a bonus visited Motteau bakery (yum) and did a photo shoot with Ricardo again (damn he’s good). No, I’m not putting any of those pictures here, thank you! Finally, I took the bus out to the airport, wasted an hour or two with Europcar trying to get the car I’d reserved and not a SUV, and finally got on the road back to Logroño, in Rioja.

Again, I won’t go into all of the details here, but I was essentially on a two week road trip at this point. I did all of the stuff I’d predictably do: visited caves (one great off-trail tour, one not-so-great one, one fairly good one), ate at a couple of excellent restaurants (Ricardo Temiño in Burgos being by far the best of them all; my God, that was good), and visited a number of random tourist things, from the Cervantes museum in Valladolid to the Tordesillas treaty museum, some UNESCO World Heritage sites, monasteries, wineries, other cities.. you name it. I capped it all off with a couple of nights at Fuente Dé and a seriously wonderful day-long hike through the mountains; it had already snowed enough to make part of that hike impassable, so I didn’t quite make it everywhere I wanted to, but hey: that was more than enough.

I drove back to Madrid, slept at an airport hotel, returned the car, met one of my friends for coffee at the airport - he was just flying back to Madrid - and then got on a plane to London to see my family. Again, not the place or time for me to talk about that here, but it was a good visit: my parents and my husband and me, together, for a fine afternoon of conversation together.

And that, dear reader, was the end of my Camino… well, sort of. When I was in Berlin, I ran into a friend from Hanover who suggested I stop by sometime; a few weeks later, I saw an airfare from Palm Springs to Santiago de Compostela for $469, figured I could spend two weeks visiting my parents in London, then go to the bears’ weekend in Hamburg, pop down to Hanover for a night, fly to Santiago, finish the Camino, and then head home. Perfect, right? Well, as luck would have it, things turned out a little bit differently. First of all, my Mom died, but that meant that my time in London was suddenly a very necessary thing and not just a lark. It was good to spend time with my Dad; I even got to sneak out twice and visit friends in London proper. And then I flew off to Hamburg; the bears’ weekend was excellent - and I also remembered that this guy Arno Schmidt was born there. That’s another long story, but back in my student days, I read more books on Schmidt than pretty much anything else. Schmidt was a German author; it’s hard to describe his work, but it’s definitely on the high-modernist side of things. Although I didn’t read much of his primary work, I read all kinds of secondary literature about him as kind of a hobby; when I was a senior at Berkeley, I even drove up to Oregon to attend the first every Arno Schmidt conference, where I met the folks who run the foundation that published almost all of that stuff, plus John E. Woods, his American translator. So, further coincidence: last Sunday was Schmidt’s birthday and there was going to be a reading of his diaries to mark the date in Celle, not far from Hanover, so my trip to friends in Hanover changed a bit when they graciously agreed to drive me over to Celle to attend the reading.

And from there, well, it was back to Hamburg and down to Santiago de Compostela via Madrid. Unusually, it was the same crew and plane on both segments; the friendly stewardess decided I was worthy of an upgrade to an extra legroom seat, so I flew in style for that last hour to Santiago. I checked in to the oldest hotel in Spain, the Hostal dos Reis Católicos, and got my hiking clothes ready to go for the next day.

I left a bunch of stuff at the hotel - hey, those Arno Schmidt books are heavy! - and took the train to Sarria to start the end of the Camino. That… did not go quite as expected. I misjudged the weather, misjudged my tolerance for cold, and also misjudged the state of my feet. After two days and 50 km walking, I saw that the next day would be even colder, with snow showers - and decided that I had had enough, thank you. I woke up, bought a bus ticket, waited half an hour for the bus, then was informed by a local that oh yeah, the bus was on strike, grrr. Took a taxi to Santiago, checked in to the same hotel, and decided that it was time to just chill and read for a bit. I walked around town, checked out a few museums… and then decided that, well, I should try to get the damn compostela, the proof of pilgrimage completion, even if I hadn’t quite completed the pilgrimage, technically. (I had walked more than 70 km in Spain, definitely more than 100 km in Spain, and overall around 845 km, but had not hiked the final stage into Santiago.) Thankfully, the pilgrim office didn’t really seem to care much; having an obviously French credencial with a bunch of stamps from a long ways off did the trick just fine. (As a bonus, the security guard who works there was one of the woofiest guys I’ve seen all year. Damn.) They also sold me a certificate of distance, which has the wrong number on it due to a mistake on my part (I misremembered the number I’d been keeping in a spreadsheet). I’ll either fix that tomorrow - or just stick a Post-It on it. (It’s not the main certificate itself, so it’s not that important.)

(As an aside, I also headed over to the city tourist information office to get a Dual Pilgrim certificate; you can get that if you’ve hiked both the Camino and the Kumano Kodo. I’d always wanted that - I’m not even the first of my friends to get it, but hey: bragging rights, woohoo!)

So yeah. I have that now. It feels a little bit insincere because I am missing that one stage, but who knows, I could always walk it tomorrow. Or not. I rented a car today and drove it; it’s more of the same, a grim paved strip next to a busy road through unexpectional terrain. I’ve seen more than my fair share of that on the Camino; in fact, I’ve seen enough.

Now, I’m going to shut down this laptop, head to the hotel restaurant, and have myself a vermouth before supper.

If you’ve read this far: thank you. If you ever find yourself wanting to hike any of these pilgrimages, let me know if there’s any way I can be of assistance. Above all: if you find yourself wondering if you can or should do it, the answer is always yes. You can; if you want to, you should.