Found Along The Way:
Stories from the Camino de Santiago

As The Way quietly beckoned, she realized she had not so much chosen to walk the Camino . . . the Camino had chosen her.

When Sheila Kogan lost her boyfriend, job, and dog, what she thought were the mainstays of her life, she experienced the tough lesson of not being in control. But fate and a friend encouraged her to walk the Camino de Santiago in Spain — by herself. At first, she scoffed at the absurdity of a non- hiking, anti-backpacking, limited-Spanish-speaking, saint-resisting, Jewish-Catholic skeptic walking The Way of Saint James. Yet there was a tug to follow this thousand-year-old trail — if she could do it.

In twenty connected stories, Sheila Kogan’s Found Along The Way takes us on her five-hundred-mile pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago. Through humorous, homey, at times sacred experiences, we travel on a journey between doubt and trust, physical exhaustion and spiritual rebirth.

From Chapter 1: The Ticket…

“WHAT IF I DIE out there?” I turned to my son for reassurance. “Just joking…sort of.”

“Hell of a way to go, Mom.”

Grinning, he pulled up to the airline terminal, jumped out and swung my backpack out of the trunk. “Safe travels,” he whispered, giving me a quick, tight hug. Then he added, “By the way, happy Mother’s Day.”

I bared my teeth into what I hoped would pass for a smile and waved goodbye. He slid back into the driver’s seat, honked twice, and vanished into the rush of vehicles.

Standing outside San Francisco International, I stared after the car long after it had disappeared. My stomach lurched in my high-tech microfiber hiking pants. Did I have to pee again? I was three months shy of my sixty-seventh birthday, had traveled alone only once, and had not quite finished lesson three in my Spanish speaking CDs. What was I thinking heading off to walk across Spain—the width of a whole country—by myself?