My Summer at the Lighthouse

At last check you may remember me heading to California to live and work at the hostel with the lighthouse, in Montara. I went for the summer and stayed for a lifetime. At least it contained enough joy, learning, experiences, laughter, and tears to count as a lifetime. And enough laundry to count for...?...how many lifetimes?

The original plan was to work last summer at the hostel and then head to Spain in September to walk the Camino again. Hmmm. I got as far as Fort Lauderdale and then turned around, back to California, back to the hostel, back to the lighthouse, and back to the beautiful and powerful Pacific Ocean. And not incidentally, back to love.

If I tell you the California coast is beautiful, I must also tell you that you have to see it for yourself. You have to feel it and hear it and walk along its shores. And you have to, just once in your life, sit above the pounding waves watching the beam of the lighthouse sweep across the thick fog on a chill August night.

You must also someday meet the people I spent my 9-month long summer with. (This is where the love comes in.)

So now that summer is over, sadly, but with the joyful anticipation of what's next. I leave for Europe in the morning, on March 27, 2007, to experience Germany with Erdmute, who I met on the Camino in 2005, and to walk again the long pilgrimage trail across the north of Spain.

When one walks the Camino, one is greeted frequently with the saying "buen Camino", literally translated as the wish of "good way." I can't wait to hear and say this for the first time, on my second pilgrimage. More about that to come...but first I have to get used to this blogging thing!