Beautiful old stone steps in Provence

When I began to think about training for walking the Camino, I didn’t imagine I would be doing so much walking in other countries this year.  But France, Italy, and Australia presented themselves to me and I walked in each of these beautiful places.

Walking around Paris is easy, and I posted a few months ago about that impressive city.  Then there was Italy.  My trusty pedometer on my hip throughout Rome, Siena, Florence, Lucca and Venice, my roomate and I logged over 100 miles on that trip, and it was oh, so painless!

This past month, I had the pleasure and surprise of spending time in various parts of Australia with my long-time partner Neil, my daughter Ashley and her husband Justin.  Ashley and Justin have been traveling the world for the past 14 months, mostly the southern hemisphere, (see theparallellife.com) and they planned their stops so that they could come from Indonesia and meet us in Perth for the beginning of our Australian adventure.  We began nearly four hours south of Perth, in Busselton and the Margaret River Valley area of Western Australia.

A walking path down to the beach near Busselton

While we knew we would be tasting delicious wines, we hadn’t had any idea we would also be surrounded by soft sand beaches, red rocky coastlines bordering towns with aboriginal names like Nannup, Yallingup, Cowaranup, etc.

Even our time-share resort had winding pathways straight to the golden beige beaches, and from our resort property, we watched the sunset.  During the day, we drove to our chosen wineries, and at midday, took our picnic lunches, found a recommended beach, and walked.  We chose our picnic rocks carefully, perched with sandwiches and water, and took a break from the walking.  After a good long hike up and down the boulders to the beach and back, our next destination was another winery.  With a bottle or two to take with us back “home”, we reversed our road tracks and settled down to make our dinner, complete with the wine of the day.  Watching the sunset, and then walking again in the dusky dark or early the next morning, we were never very far from an accidental Camino training session.

Our first sunset in Western Australia – Busselton Beach