Afoot and light – hearted, I take to the open road,   
Healthy, free, the world before me,      
 The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose.
 — Walt Whitman                                                                                                                                                  

Exactly nine days from now, I will be boarding the American Airline to Paris to start my walk on the Camino de Santiago, the French Way.

From Saint Jean Pied de Port, a small village town in France to Santiago de Compostela, the capital of northwest Spain’s Galicia region, this is a 500 miles or 800 kilometers stretch from east to west.

I plan to measure it step by step using my own feet during this one month time frame. That means I need to walk about 18 miles or 30 kilometers plus per day for 25+ days straight. This doesn’t including my time flying there and back home. When I finish measuring along the way, I will be granted that official honorable certificate to prove that I did it.

I have been preparing and anticipating this walk for the last couple of months when, at one point, I knew this was meant to happen. However, the moment time of my first desire to do the walk could actually track back much longer than two months – It was actually two years ago on the night when I was introduced to the movie “The Way.”  Since then, the idea that I want to do it someday has been rooted in my mind.

This epic Camino is well-known in Europe and the world. It’s considered the Walk of a Life Achievement!

Since the discovery of the burial site of the evangelical apostle St James who was one of the twelve followers of Jesus, in the 9^th century, this pilgrimage route to Santiago has become one of the three great Christian pilgrimage roads. The other two are the one to Jerusalem and the one to Rome. In ancient times, the Catholic Church would forgive the sins of people who completed the pilgrimage journey.

You don’t have to be religious to walk the way, but I believe a lot of the people who choose to walk the road are more spiritual. Many of them carry his or her own story and faithfully set out onto the road.  People hope to find their own deepest spiritual meaning, to discover who they are, what they are meant to be with their current lives.

As I consider myself more of a spiritual being than a physical being, this walk seems to me the perfect one to go back or to get as close as I can to my original form. I hope the walk will allow me to go as deep as I can to reach my heart and soul, to allow me to further explore the inner world of myself. Only when you know yourself well and when you free yourself from within, you gain true freedom in life.

I’m very excited and grateful that I have the opportunity to experience this tremendous life adventure soon.