It’s been a few months now since I hung up my hiking shoes for the last time, but I was reminded of my questions about what it means to be a pilgrim again this morning after reading a powerful commencement speech by Nipun Mehta.
My time in the village of Åre, Sweden, was supposed to be about skiing, but what I found myself exploring with as much energy as the piste was the Swedish cuisine of the Jämtland region – from savory reindeer meat to tangy cloudberries.
![A soul sister [mis]adventure: Notes on when travel isn’t perfect.](https://www.candaceroserardon.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/IMG_9531.jpg "A soul sister [mis]adventure: Notes on when travel isn’t perfect.")
The day had been a classic cocktail of frustration: delays, long waits and wrong turns. But for the thousandth time, I’d forgotten that travel won’t always be perfect – and that I myself won’t always be a perfect traveler.
Although a flight from Sevilla to Marrakech might’ve been easier, something told me it wouldn’t have allowed me to really feel and process the change in countries – not to mention the change in continents.
Some journeys feel more like a poem in their brevity, in the way they leave you with not so much a discernible storyline as a collection of images – fleeting impressions that stay visible in your mind long after you’ve left. My time on Mallorca was just that.
I’ve been grateful to feel at home in Madrid, to not only have my own room again, but a desk to write at and an armchair to read in, all while sounds of the city and afternoon sunshine waft in through open windows.
It’s only my fourth day on the Camino de Santiago trail, but already I can feel it happening–that strange process whereby what I’m doing now becomes all I’ve ever done; as though I’ve always been walking through rural Spanish countryside.
In my mind, this trip to Åre was closing out a chapter—and to find it ending in the same country where it began nearly four years ago, with the same exact meal, was a fitting kind of symmetry to the literary geek in me.
Lately, I’ve started to laugh at myself more–finding the humility to admit I won’t always have it together or nail a new activity the first time I try it. I couldn’t have done so soon enough.
I was recently invited to a Swedish ski resort called Åre. The region’s alpine landscape promises to be a world away from Stockholm’s cobblestoned streets—but it’s a world I can’t wait to explore.