Travel is the chance to experience life outside the box, especially when in venues so different and foreign from home. Navigating through each day brings challenges to shopping, finding the right train or bus to reach a destination, ordering food—all activities we take for granted in our homeland. Since I haven’t yet landed my dream job as a travel writer, creating this blog for our hike on one of the many Camino de Santiago pilgrimage routes is a start in that direction.  In the meantime, between trips, I live in Girdwood, Alaska — the Switzerland of Alaska — a small ski town, formerly a gold mining community, of about 2,000 residents nestled in the Chugach Mountains.  Alaska has been my home since, at the tender age of 6 months in early 1955, my family took to the road that spring, a la “the Grapes of Wrath” and left Oregon with three kids, a dog, a Studebaker pickup towing an Airstream trailer, a Kaiser sedan towing a one-wheel trailer, and headed for Fairbanks, Alaska, where I grew up.  My husband of 35 years and I raised two smart, talented, wonderful children there but, after 55 Fairbanks winters I’d had enough of the cold and dark interior.  We moved to Girdwood in 2010 and are smitten with it and all this little powerhouse community has to offer.  Thanks for following my blog.