Santiago, Spain – Tomorrow we begin!
March 31, 2024
Tomorrow is the day!
After a drive, a flight, 2 buses, and a 30 minute walk, I arrived in Santiago de Compostela, Spain yesterday and got settled into my room in an AirBnB. My host is college student, Matias. His English is worse than my Spanish, but we manage as we will barely see each other. The room is small, clean, cheap, and adequate. Exactly what I needed.
Today was Easter. A very special day to receive my Peregrino (pilgrim) blessing during Mass at the Cathedral after I picked up my pilgrim passport, my “Credential”.
Tomorrow, I will drop my suitcase off to storage and catch a bus to Ferroll, where my walk begins!
I will share videos, photos, and updates here daily.
Thank you for helping me to help these precious children born with CDH!
Last week: https://youtube.com/shorts/dqC4ORK0b6o
My Shane: https://youtu.be/sCPDRIBRkOU
Today is the first day of Congenital Diaphragmatic Hernia Awareness Month!
For the next 30 days, we will be sharing lots of things over social media, holding fundraisers, buildings will light up, proclamations have been written, and patient families will share their stories. It is the busiest and most exciting month of the year for our charity and our community. I am very grateful to have some good people who have worked very hard for almost the last year to light up the world, gather proclamations, and help with all the social media posts. Our cherubs definitely have angels helping them along the way.
Learn more and join in at http://www.cdhawarenessday.org
Santiago to Ferrol, Spain – Tomorrow we begin!
April 1, 2024
Well, no one can say that I haven’t walked through hail for the charity. Haha.
After walking through a hailstorm this morning from Santiago to Compostela, I found the luggage storage place and left my suitcase. I also had to find a backpack cover because it’s been raining every day, and then I made it to the bus stop and arrived in Ferrol at 4 o’clock this afternoon.
In our pilgrim passport, we must get two stamps every day along the way, and we must have walked or ran at least 100 km to qualify for the certificate or the Compostela. That is something that’s very important to religious pilgrims, and it’s something that I am going to set my mind to achieve.
Because it was so late arriving in Ferrol, I would not have been able to get to the starting point at the church and receive two stamps today or walked very far before it got dark, so I decided to grab a place to stay and get some charity work done and start early tomorrow morning.
I also tore my backpack. I put too much weight in the straps, so I had to sew that up this evening, and I had to get rid of quite a few things, so I left some presents for the housekeeper at the hotel, and there’s no telling what she’s going to think when she finds such an eclectic array of odd things on the dresser. Can you guess what these things are for?
Today’s video – https://youtube.com/shorts/Ypxf5UxG_8g?si=8fIy_hGadkOMipoe
I’m a bit frustrated that I am getting a late start, and I am disappointed in the weather, but I will make do, and I will get on the way. This is probably a bit of a blessing as I didn’t get any sleep last night because the room in the Airbnb that I rented was about 35° and freezing, and I didn’t sleep very much at all. As a budget traveler, sometimes you get what you pay for. Really nice roommate, very clean, comfortable location other than the temperature. The heating went out right before I arrived, and he tried his best to get it fixed but wasn’t able to, so you just have to go with the flow sometimes. I slept fully dressed with multiple blankets but still couldn’t sleep because it was so cold. I stayed up late trying to get some charity work knocked out before I started the walk.
It’s been a little bit of a struggle, trying to get all the computer work done for the Charity and my other work with this travel and this walk. We are grossly understaffed at the Charity and overwhelmed with work, and no matter how many times I try to delegate volunteer management, it’s just not working, so I’m going to have to find time somehow to organize volunteers to get things done, but I’m very grateful that we have several people who want to help. And I hope that once I’m in one place after this walk, I will be able to get people trained. It’s been a few years of Charity, and we are adjusting post-Covid with a new team.
I am on a very tight budget for this walk, and the hotel took a lot of my budget for the day, so I grabbed a sandwich for dinner and am back at the computer to get some work done.
All of my updates will be here on my fundraising page. I will post reels every day on social media platforms. If you’d like to support this walk and help children born with CDH, please donate or sponsor me. Or better yet, start your own fundraiser or join the walk virtually. I’m just a grieving mom from North Carolina in Spain, walking to try to help save some kids. I’m only one person, but there are other people doing virtual walks and fundraisers. There’s no huge entity funding research for our kids, so it has to be us, the moms and dads, survivors, and grandparents. We could really use your help.
