Ten years ago Kurt and Sharon each checked the "65+" age box for "seniors." Their "Senior Independent Living Center" has plenty of senior wrinkles, repeated old stories, and quiet fears about aging and dying. These all leave Kurt the retired pastor and Sharon the retired nurse hardly feeling "independent." Their personal wall calendars have endless medical appointments built around empty days. The mental lint of choices like "mashed or baked potato for tomorrow's lunch?" and corridors filled with "Muzak of your life" have combined to leech the joy, purpose and meaning from anything resembling "Living."
Feeling like they are saving their sanity and lives, Kurt and Sharon escape---all the way to Spain's "Way", the "Camino de Santiago." Despite their bad knees and faded strength, this 1000-year-old pilgrims' path silently welcomes the two white-haired Americans to join the walkers. The multi-national, multi-aged pilgrims walking "The Way"----- the lost (like a cat they meet), the disconnected (a stock broker in a failing marriage), the belittled (both the artistic and the devout)------ all these fellow walkers give Sharon's rickshaw a second look as they chat with her and encourage Kurt, who is pulling the rickshaw.
Like everyone crunching on the gravel across northern Spain, Kurt and Sharon slowly find themselves living again. Even their fears of what will happen, and how, or even where, they will live at journey's end, cannot hide their growing sense of "mattering" to others. They also find themselves mattering to each other as a couple, so that their long relationship might even hold a love they have each held inside for too long.
