Forty Days: One Woman's Pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago

With her sixtieth birthday behind her and her parents' difficult final years fresh in her mind, Catherine MacGovern set out to do something that scared her: walk five hundred miles across northern Spain on the ancient pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela. Over forty days she crossed mountains and meseta, wore through her shoes, lost her guidebook, and found unexpected companions along the Way of St. James—pilgrims from around the world, mendicants, the grieving, locals, the young and old who became friends for a day or a lifetime. What she discovered was less about the destination than about learning, step by step, to keep going.

Seven years on, she would face a challenge more difficult than anything Spain had put in her path and the Camino would come rushing back — a steady voice reminding her how to move forward when the way ahead is uncertain. This is a memoir about a five-hundred-mile walk, and about the resilience it leaves behind long after the boots come off. Buen Camino.