The Way of St. Francis, ITALY

 August 29,2022 Our two weeks in Spain will come to an end tomorrow. We visited some beaches, hiked some mountain peaks, had a front-row view of the Tour de Spain, ate and visited family, a lot of family, a lot of eating. Enrique is one of 13 children. One brother lives in Truckee, the other 11 live in Spain. We visited with 9 of them, and none speak English. It’s been a great opportunity to practice and improve on my Spanish, but whenever we visited the nieces and nephews, who do speak English, I was happy to convert back to speaking English, to give my brain a rest. Food is an important part of Spanish culture. We ate a small breakfast and around 2:00-3:00, we ate a huge lunch of soup, salad, main course, fruit, cheese and, of course, plenty of bread and wine. I could have been happy to just eat that one big meal a day, but around 9:00-9:30, a smaller dinner was served. And when food is served, you eat. I love Spanish food, but on this visit, eating has not been as enjoyable for ...

 August 15, 2022 In just a few hours, Enrique and I are flying to Spain to visit his family for two weeks. Our Italian adventure begins after that. Four years ago, we completed the Camino de Santiago, 500 miles of walking across Spain. We loved the experience, so as soon as we returned, we started looking into other Caminos that we could walk. After much research (there are a lot of caminos), we decided to do The Way of St. Francis. This camino goes from Florence to Rome, Italy. That would take a month of walking, so we pared it down to Florence to Assisi, which should take two weeks. We were prepared to go in the fall of 2020. When Covid hit in March, 2020, I remember saying to Enrique that surely it would be resolved by that summer and we would be fine to go.😂 So naïve. So here we are, two years later ready to finally embark on our adventure.