Women of the Way: Embracing the Camino
Jane V. Blanchard, author and public speaker, was born in Hartford, Connecticut. She lived in Hampstead, New Hampshire, twenty-three years before moving to Sarasota, Florida, where she now resides. In Florida, Jane became active in several organizations benefiting women and hosted a weekly radio talk show, Women Matters. Jane loves the outdoors. She climbed her first mountain, Mount Washington, in 1974. Since that initial ascent, Jane has climbed twenty of the forty 4,000-foot mountains in New England. She started mountain bike racing at age 50; in 2002, she won second place in the Masters Division EFTA Championship Series. In September and October 2011, Jane, now a sexagenarian, hiked the Camino de Santiago, a 500-mile pilgrimage across northern Spain. As she walked, she talked with women from different nations. The book, Women of the Way: Embracing the Camino, weaves these conversations with Jane's journey. When Jane married in 1974, her husband, Dennis and she joked about creating a lifetime of memories to chat about when sitting in theirs rockers in old age. At 61 years old, Jane is still creating memories, experiencing life as fully as possible, and looking forward to a long future.