Behind the Scenes: What Inspired Baby Walks to Santiago

Every book has a story behind it. This is the inspiration to Baby Walks to Santiago and why this journey meant so much to us

Why would I write a book?

I love telling stories—it's why I started this blog in the first place. At first, I just hoped to write things people would enjoy, maybe even make them smile. What I didn’t expect was discovering how much I loved writing itself. It became a hobby, fueling my "I need to try something new once in a while" mindset. At some point, "I should write a book" landed on my list of ideas. Someday, when I have a good topic that I think I can write about, I might pull the idea from the list and do something about it.

The love for traveling

If you’ve read anything on this blog, you know I love traveling. That feeling of disconnecting from your regular life for a while and discovering a new place is something that I constantly want to replicate. Every employer I’ve ever had knew one thing: when I’m on vacation, I’m unreachable. No emails, no calls—just pure quality time with my family. This is a principle. This is how important it is to me. Lucky for me, I found myself a partner in crime that enjoys exactly the same thing and is much more active at initiating and planning than me. With this partnership we have traveled plenty, and some of our adventures could be found among the pages of this blog.

Journaling

When my son was born I decided to pick-up journaling. I wanted to remember things that happened, feelings and thoughts that I had as a new father. This became a daily routine and notebooks started to get filled. I would usually write before I go to sleep and I would write about everything that happened that day.

My journaling routine changed a lot over time, but at the time of writing this post my son is 1.5 year old and I've managed to write something almost every day since he was born.

Celebrating family

Being a father was always a dream of mine, and once it happened I couldn't be happier (or so I thought). Once we overcame the initial parental struggles and realized we are a happy family we felt the need to celebrate. At that point we had Camino de Santiago on our bucket list for some time already, but our traveling bucket list was quite low on the priority list, at least on mine. That is until Lucy suggested that we do the Camino with our son, as the celebration. This was an exciting idea! It combined so many things I loved: my family, travel, hiking, and proving all the naysayers that kept telling us that once you become a parent your life ends wrong. It was a done deal!

Journaling 2.0

Lucy loves to plan travel. She is queen of research, and she is original. This means that there are times that you can't find much information about the specific things she wants to do. If you had the chance to read about our hike in the Greek mountains, that is a route she constructed herself out of multiple blog posts of people that did different parts of it. This was another reason for me to start this blog - to get the information out there so that another Lucy has an easier life planning.

This was also one of the reasons that my social-media-less partner decided to do her own version of journaling and open an Instagram account in which she would post photos from our journey and information for other parents that might be interested. She called it - you guessed it - @babywalkstosantiago.

The perfect Camino memory

The Camino was an amazing experience for us. It surpassed all of our expectations and left its mark on our lives. We are not special in this. A lot of people have the same feeling and they want to remember it forever. We met people that got a Camino tattoo, people that got a hand made map of their route to hang on the wall, or any other memory gesture you can imagine.

Once we returned home I started thinking what could be the perfect way to remember the Camino. Since I'm not a tattoo person, and we forgot to find the person that does the handmade maps when we were in Santiago, I had to find something else.

One night, as I sat journaling, remembering the magic of the Camino, it hit me: This is the story I need to tell. After all, I was there... I also realized that I already have a title: Baby Walks to Santiago. I also realized that I already did a lot of the writing (remember my newly acquired journaling habit?). This way, Sebastian would also be able to get real context and "remember" a bit more than what is shown in the many photos we took. From there on it was clear. This is my lasting memory.

Final thoughts

From that point to the point that the book was published 4 months have passed, but that is a story for another time.

The bottom line is, this is my inspiration for the book:

• I wanted to write a book

• I wanted a lasting memory from our journey

And as a side-effect to starting the writing process,

• I wanted Sebastian to know the story

Would you have a different inspiration to write this book? Let me know!

And if you want to read what came out of this inspiration - Get your copy of Baby Walks to Santiago here!