A Journey of Days

A Journey of Days: Relearning Life s Lessons on the Camino de Santiago, by Guy Thatcher, takes us for a 700-kilometre walk along the camino in northern Spain, an age-old pilgrimage route walked by young and old alike for centuries. He walked the camino hoping to discover the reason for the compulsion that drove him there.

This is an elegantly presented, intelligent book. Your goal may not be to walk the camino, as Thatcher has done, but you ll come away informed, inspired and touched by this beautiful narrative. The real story is the pilgrims met along the way. This book will be of interest to the boomer generation but also those in mid-career, as they were the ones the author walked with most often. An intergenerational story and an inspiration to all. The style is so direct that it s easy to imagine sitting across a small bar table chatting with the author. Wonderful colour photos complement the text on magazine-quality pages. The book feels great as you hold it; the cover is a fabulously crafted design.

Guy Thatcher served in the Canadian regular armed forces from 1955 to 1980 as a tank officer, helicopter pilot, anti-tank missile instructor, and computer analyst, serving in Germany, Belgium, Cyprus, Texas, and Alabama, as well as at various bases in Canada. He then pursued a second career for a further twenty-five years as a management consultant, working primarily in the field of facility planning and management. He holds a degree in Computing and Information Systems from Queen s University in Kingston, Ontario, is a Fellow of the International Facility Management Association and is a lifetime Certified Management Consultant. He developed and taught postgraduate courses in Information Management for Facility Professionals at Michigan State University, delivered worldwide over the Internet. He has written or contributed to several business books and workshop manuals. He continues to teach in the Caribbean, successfully combining work and pleasure.

He continues to be married to Carroll Thatcher, with whom he has four grown children and one new grandson, clearly the most beautiful baby in the world. For the past seventeen years, he has been a home support volunteer for the Hospice at May Court. He skis, travels as much as he can, gardens, scuba dives (occasionally), reads voraciously--mostly history and science--, square dances, teaches, and plays a truly dreadful game of golf.

All of this, however, has nothing to do with the walk he took across Spain . . . or perhaps it has everything to do with the walk he took across Spain. He lives in Ottawa, Canada, and you can contact him at journeyofdays@yahoo.ca.