Who am I?

The easy answer is Leslie Gilmour.  Another one is pilgrim.  Another, Scottish.

I only made the choice to be one of these.  I think that life is interesting in the amount of choices that are made for us before we are able to consider ourselves the implication of those choices.  I have been reading too much recently, a lot of it political philosophy.  At one point I enjoyed philosophy – now I often wonder at the worth of it all.  I think about many things that are unchangeable.

Anyway, who am I and what gives me the right to write all this stuff about the Camino?

I walked the Camino the first time for a cheap getting away from it all quiet time.  I was a student and had little money for the summer and wanted to get away.  My friend had walked the Camino and went on about it somewhat.  I loved it and when I came back i started to write some articles about it, I only got one published.  A few friends continued to tell me I should keep writing.

I went and walked the Camino again.  Then one freezing winter while stuck in Prague and feeling a bit confined while recovering from an operation i decided that I really should know how to create a web site. So I did – this one.

The HTML and other markup and coding was fairly simple – I had some programing experience from quite a long time ago and I found it all very logical. My biggest problem is design – as can be seen from the site.  My design now of other sites has become much better – but still I do not open graphical software with delight – more trepidation, though it is slowly changing, in complete sync with my knowledge!

So after this short learning curve on site building I was off.  Being a little competitive I wanted to build a great site; loads of information and have loads of visitors.   I was stunned in the beginning when I got quite a few emails telling me how bad the site was and I was ripped apart in a couple of Camino forums.  This had a wonderful motivating effect on me.   I wrote and wrote, told my stories and my experience, I promotted my site by what little methods I knew.  And it all worked – as far as I am concerned.

I get great joy and happiness from this site, it has about 10,000 visitors per month, I get emails now asking me for more information and thanking me for the site.  The site has now, I feel, taken on a life of its own.  There are pages in different languages being added,  all done by volunteers bringing the Camino to some areas where there is little information.

Who am I? Does that really matter?

I am you.

I wonder at how different we all really are.  But enough for today.