The current that came in Pau

“I travelled to Pau just to get these chocolates for my mother for her birthday. They’re the best”.

He bends down and pulls out a prettily packed blue and aqua striped bag with cursive French letters filled with little circular shaped chocolates.

His name is Sacha and he’s a London born young guy with a cheeky glint who moved to the south of France with his parents 15 years ago.

Patrick and I reach in, pick one each and take a bite.

That’s when I feel it.

We’re stepping into a current.

It’s beyond us, beyond this moment, beyond this train and Sacha.

It’s this feeling of being part of something that is both a mystery and has been precisely laid out like dominos by something greater than this taste in my mouth right now.

I’ve been waiting for the feeling that this trip has begun. That the winds are blowing leaves down a path I know I need to walk.

And it’s just happened, after 2 months in Europe, well it’s happening now.

The first whispers were 5 months ago when talking to our friend Guy I saw an image of mountains in my minds eye and then suddenly I knew what I had to do, where I needed to go.

Then the first steps were 2 months ago when I left Melbourne for Italy.

Now the winds are here, and they blow with a sweet nudge to a town visited by pilgrims for many years, a town called St Jean Pierre de Port, the beginning of the great Camino de Compostela: the 900+ km walk from the south of France to Santiago and then to Finisterre, affectionately called the edge of the Earth.

Tomorrow the walk begins.

It could be 40+ days, who knows.

A simple life of hiking through villages walked by millions, eating fresh Spanish food, meeting new people, playing new songs on my trusty little ukulele, breathing, living with very little material objects I can carry in just a 3kg back pack, finishing the first draft of my first book and having a wild, life affirming adventure with my love.

A new journey begins.

Buen Camino Anatoli and Patrick.