Getting Ready!

Matthew has already told the story of our planning day in London, the breakfast, the maps, the visit to Westminster Cathedral that I am still processing. What he didn’t mention is that on the train home, I sat with a coffee and a vague sense of mild panic, because it was somewhere between Stanfords and Baker Street station that it stopped feeling like an idea and started feeling like a thing that is actually going to happen.

Over 9,000 kilometres in forty-two days visiting fourteen countries. One evangelical Anglican rector who is still, if he’s honest, not entirely sure what he’s signed up for.

The thing about preparing for a trip like this is that there is no single moment when you feel ready. There’s just a list that gets shorter, and then longer again, and then shorter once more. Every time you solve one problem, where to sleep, what to wear, how to keep the bike safe overnight in a country you’ve never visited, you find three more things underneath it that you hadn’t thought to ask yet.

It starts practically enough. Riding gear that will work in a Spanish August and an Alpine morning and everywhere in between. Security kit, because leaving a motorcycle outside for forty-two nights across fourteen countries concentrates the mind considerably. A sleeping setup that is genuinely lightweight without being genuinely useless. A camera system that can actually do justice to the places we’re going to visit, because we’re not just riding, we’re documenting, and some of these shrines have been drawing pilgrims for centuries. They deserve better than shaky phone footage.

Each of those is its own rabbit hole. Each one takes more time than you’d expect. And underneath all of it is a quieter question that the preparation doesn’t quite answer, which is: what are you actually going for?

I’m a Church of England rector. I ride a Kawasaki. I am, as Matthew has already noted on this very website, a died-in-the-wool protestant. Marian shrines are not exactly my natural habitat.

And yet. There’s something about the scale of this, the centuries of pilgrimage, the millions of people who have made their way to Lourdes or Fatima or Santiago carrying something they needed to lay down, that I find I can’t quite dismiss. I’m going with questions more than answers. I think that might be the right way to go.

The gear is sorted. The route is planned. The rosary is in my pocket. We leave on the 23rd of July!