About

Between 2011 and 2025, I have done the traditional route of the Way, the French, four times, once from Roncesvalles and three from St. Jean Pied de Port, and on two of those occasions I continued on, once to Finisterre and once to Muxía-Finisterre; the Aragonese access from Somport to Puente la Reina; the Central Portuguese Way from Lisbon; the English route; and the North route up to Asturias, then connecting with the Primitive route. In this last case, I was forced in Tineo to hire a taxi to jump over some 117 kilometers buried under up to a meter of the snow of an out-of-season storm, so the complete Primitive route, on foot, remains a dream.

I have written five books about my pilgrimages: Into Galicia, Different Paths: Struggles on the French Camino de Santiago de Compostela, A Camino for Enrique, El Camino para Bolivia: Peregrinajes y Testimonios, and On the Way Again: Walking the Camino at 81. In these books, I have tried to combine my personal feelings and reflections with the physical experience of those walks. As one reviewer commented on Into Galicia, “A great travelogue. A must read… to accompany the agony and bliss of transformational travel.” I was moved. My daughter is very generous.

I spent nearly forty years at the Inter-American Development Bank and, after retiring in 2004, have remained equally committed to Princeton in Latin America (PiLA), a nonprofit foundation whose mission is to provide recent college graduates with service experiences in that region that allow them to develop the skills, character and compassion necessary to serve as the world leaders of the future. Twice married, this time for keeps, four times a father, five times a grandfather, and now a great grandfather, and blessed with lifelong friendships, I’m a very lucky man. I feel like a foreigner in our home in Bethesda, Maryland, at home as a foreigner abroad, including on the Camino.