Clothes

Some of my friends whom I would love to have with me on my pilgrimage do not want to wear medieval clothes. 

I know, it blows my mind.  Not only that, but it tortures my soul and tears at my heart.

I haven't decided on a century to recreate (sometime after 1250 and before 1550), much less a particular fashion, but I feel that clothing is integral to the experience!  The reason I sew clothes is so that I can DO things in them!  Feel what life was like in someone else's skin, or the closest thing to it.  And maybe this is a premature issue, but I think it is important for my party of pilgrims to be dressed for the part.  Please tell me if I am being unreasonable about this (though I will probably ignore you if you say that I am).

Thank you.

from Amsterdam, over the Alps, across the sea, to the Holy City

While GoogleMaps won't show me a walking path from Amsterdam to Jerusalem, it will get me at least to Venice, which is as far as I'm planning on walking.  Apparently it will only take me 9 days and 20 hours to get there!!  wow, Europe is small!  If I drove, it would only take me 12 hours.  So, a total of 236 hours of walking, divided by a minimum of 12 miles a day (we could take it easy) equals just under 20 days.  Easypeasy!

Of course, I don't want to be walking on the edge of the highway the whole way, so I looked up hiking trails in Wiki and found out that there are ELEVEN different Long Distance Walking Trails that crisscross Europe.  I could follow a chunk of E8 out of the Netherlands, pick up E1 to the border of Germany and Austria, and then take E5 over the Alps!  Wiki even says that you don't need to be an experienced hiker to do that section of the mountains, and really, who am I to argue with Wiki? 

The Beginning

I am going to creatively recreate a medieval pilgrimage from Germany to Jerusalem in the summer of 2012.  I have a lot of research to do and a lot of money to raise--clothes to sew, menus to plan, hostels to book, cathedrals to identify, boats to charter.  I first got the idea during one of my undergraduate Art History courses called "The History of the Illustrated Book".  We went through a slew of map illustrations, several of them placing Jerusalem at the center of the known world.  I suddenly got the idea in my head that it would be cool to walk from London to Jerusalem.  Maybe rent a donkey for a stretch of it.  After a few weeks of daydreaming and secretly plotting, the idea got filed away for an unidentified "later", between the idea to hike the Great Wall of China and the dream to take a camel along the ancient and fabled Silk Route.

I didn't really think about it again until... well, I don't remember what triggered it, but it was sometime in the past two months.  And I realized that if there was ever a time to do something crazy and untethered, it was now.  Once I finish my Masters, I'm a free woman.  I have no husband, no kids, no job; why not live out a dream?

There are naysayers.  Some ask where I will get the money.  (dunno)  Others think I'll get mugged.  (maybe)  Crazy is a modifier that often comes up.  But that's me!  Its a label I willingly and gleefully accept.  It just means that I can do anything. 

So, if you have any ideas, thoughts, criticisms, please post them.  I tend to get carried away by my excitement, and I need good down-to-earth people to point out the missing pieces.  Because I do need a way to raise money, and I don't really want to get mugged.  Not really.  And hey, if you love this idea and you want to come, I will be putting together a fellowship to travel with.  Pilgrims rarely traveled alone, you know.