500 Miles

A pilgrimage along the Camino Frances, the world-famous hiking trail from the French Pyrenees across Spain to Santiago, has the power to transform you, occupying your thoughts and helping make sense of the world. Back in 2010, after watching The Way, a Martin Sheen drama about the Camino, lawyer Jenifer Owenson turned to her husband and said, “Someday, we are going to do that.”

Fast-forward thirteen years, and that declaration had changed into the question, “If not now, when?” Life’s obstacles and obligations had fallen away for the couple approaching retirement, and at nearly sixty, the Owensons began studying, planning, and training for a new chapter, a 500-mile walking journey across a foreign country. Finally, on an unseasonably warm day in September, the couple took their first steps out of the French hamlet of St. Jean Pied de Port, entered the Pyrenees mountains, and crossed the Spanish border, embarking on a thirty-six-day adventure that would connect them with the land, its history, its people, and its architecture, often finding the Owesons in moments of deep, spiritual contemplation.

Crafted out of the pages of Jenifer’s travel journal, 500 Miles: Soleful Thoughts from Our Journey on the Camino is a collection of ruminative essays recounting impressions of the trail alongside personal moments of self-discovery and the awakening of the heart. Her writing memorializes the Camino’s spectacular scenery, capricious weather, and unforgiving terrain, reflects on their survival of a troubling medical emergency, and explores the Owensons’ revelations on life, marriage, and the nature of relationships—lessons one can only learn from a real, modern pilgrimage.