I am sitting in a small rudimentary room in Algeciras, a port town near Gibraltar. I will take the ferry to Morocco tomorrow. I think it was only yesterday morning that my son Colin dropped me off at the airport, but everything is kind of foggy. My itinerary was Ottawa/Toronto/Dublin/Malaga with multi-hour layovers. I was hoping to grab some sleep somewhere en route as the night before leaving I couldn’t shut my monkey mind down and only slept for a cool 45 minutes. I arrived in Malaga this afternoon with approximately three hours of sleep under my belt over the past two nights. So I missed a lot of the three hour bus ride down the beautiful Costa Del Sol. But I know it was beautiful because I came to at one point when I caught myself falling off my seat and glanced out the window. The thought flitted through my mind that I really should be enjoying the scenery before I lost consciousness again.

I am re-sorting my pack as it was meticulously taken apart and searched in Ottawa. I get randomly get selected every time! Nothing has ever been found. Well, except that one time when my ten-inch long Henckel butchers knife was found in an unused side pocket of my duffel bag after I strenuously insisted I had no knife (I had forgotten it was there from a previous picnic involving a watermelon). They didn’t care for that. Maybe that’s why.

The dash leading up to this trip was busy and full of indecision. The night before leaving, I called my daughter Sabrina and told her I was strongly considering scrapping Morocco, sleeping in my tent after all, and hiking hard in the Spanish mountains. After a short silence she responded, “Have you researched the nighttime weather” I imagined her new mother sleep-deprived, research-oriented brain cells short circuiting at my proposed very last minute total rejigging of plans. In the end, with good input from family, I circled back to my original plan of spending my first three weeks (after which I will be with Sabrina and fam…super excited for that) not sleeping in the tent. While I truly love hiking and sleeping rough, at this time of the year those mountains are cold! And I just don’t want to sleep cold anymore.

This year I am focusing on being kind to myself and mindfully working at body positivity. When I hoisted my back pack to find my waist compression straps fighting for their life my immediate reaction was that I needed enforced food deprivation, hard hiking from dawn to dusk and sleeping on rock (hence the last minute thought to bring my tent). I don’t think that’s the answer. I think a better idea is to be grateful that my body still has the health and strength to take these little jaunts of mine and to treat it with as much love as I can. So I’m going to sleep in hostels, not be cold, and compression straps be damned. Chins up!