KAILUA-KONA — At first, Alaia Leighland thought it would be a breeze selling her sleek new car.
Not that she entirely wanted to, she loves her 2010 silver Honda CRV, flush with leather interior and all the amenities, even some you might not utilize in Hawaii.
“Heated seats,” Leighland said of all bells and whistles. “Not that you need that here.”
With 70,000 miles, it still drives like a dream. She bought it last year, but things changed in Leighland’s life in June when a 70-year-old woman walked into her now closed art gallery and told Leighland about her pilgrimage. So, fast forward to today and Alaia has her car on the market.
A market which she didn’t expect.
“It’s not an island beater,” the upbeat Kailua-Kona woman said, referring to all the people who inquired about the car only to be disappointed it was in such good shape with a healthy price to match.
Leighland, like the woman who visited her store, is becoming a pilgrim. She plans to hike the Camino de Santiago.
And everything must go.
All the keepsakes and mementos collected from 15 years living on the Big Island, all the crystals she’s collected as a crystalologist, are going.
There’s no room in her backpack, a backpack with a strict weight limit. The rule the pilgrims stick by is you should only carry 10 percent of your body weight. Take into account, a gallon of water weighs eight pounds.
“All these crystals,” she said of the practice that studies the effects of gems on human physiology. “I can’t carry them with me.”
This spring, Leighland will begin to walk 570 miles across the French Pyrenees and through Spain on the famed Camino.
The Way of St. James, in English, is a route to the shrine of the apostle St. James the Great, who is believed to be buried in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, in northwestern Spain. Many take up the trek, as they did centuries before, as a form of spiritual learning or personal growth.
Which is what Leighland’s trip is about. She doesn’t expect to be the same person afterward. She’s not sure where she’ll even be afterward. But it’s a chance to regroup. That’s a meaningful word for Leighland: Regroup.
She’s always felt that the arch of life has left something out of the golden years. In fact, a person at 65, she reasons, is the same as one at 18. Both are entering new phases of their life and are expected to figure out what they want to do. But for an 18-year-old there is college that creates the structure to do that. For a 65-year-old?
“Isn’t there some place for them to regoup?” she said. “Almost like a college, where they can stop and study something new, learn something new, think about what they want to do for the next 40 years?”
There isn’t, she said. And you can only volunteer so much or play so much golf until golf gets boring. She envisions a retreat that offers those kinds of learning opportunities. She envisions a business, something new. The Camino isn’t that. But Leighland is going to walk it with that vision pushing each step.
“I will have much more of a direction on where to go and how to create this place I’ve been dreaming of in my 20s,” she said of her goal.
So she’s been selling things, and training.
Mornings, she treks Wailua Road or down Poinsettia Drive to Alii. There are other factors at play. In 2011, then a prediabetic with bad hips and knees, Leighland turned her life around and walking the Honolulu Marathon, dropping 60 pounds along the way.
“I knew she had the tenacity,” said David Bowden, a personal trainer, Florida State high school hall of fame track coach and former NFL defensive back for the Washington Redskins, who trained Leighland for the marathon that included 5 a.m. walks. “She was always a go-getter and you always admire that in people.”
Bowden is helping her during this journey. He said he was surprised when he learned of her plan. More so when he looked into the trail “and saw it was a monumental undertaking.” But the same advice goes: Visualize it, don’t get too high or too low, breathe “and keep your head up, chin out and the elbows kicking back.”
“She’s all in,” he said. “She’s all in to finish.”
And then there’s all the fun stuff.
The path has been immortalized in documentaries, websites and Hollywood in the movie, “The Way,” with Martin Sheen. More than 200,000 people embark on the trip each year and Leighland wants to meet people from different countries. She wants to eat regional dishes in quaint villages that dot the trail and can’t wait for the symbolic service at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela and for the bonfire she’ll have on the beach when she finishes on the coast.
“All of it,” she said on what she’s looking forward to.
It was the adventure part that finally sprang her into action.
In June, a 70-year-old woman walked into Pele’s Hokulele Gallery and Gifts in Keauhou Shopping Center, which Leighland had been running for five years. She told Leighland she’s just visited friends in Europe who were doing the trail, so she hopped right in and joined them — cold turkey more or less. Added to that, Leighland’s lease was ending at the gallery and that was that.
“I didn’t want to wait until I was 70 years old,” Leighland said.
What’s on the other side, she doesn’t know.
Adopted, without any family to lean on, Leighland, who departs for the mainland in February and lands in Spain in March, admits it’s a little scary if she thinks about if from a financial standpoint. She’s liquidating everything and won’t have family’s couch to crash on to regoup after the fact. But she looks at that differently, too. Excitement and fear are the same chemical, so just calling it excitement makes it so much easier.
Liquidating everything — if it sells, that is — including a well-kept, fully equipped car with heated seats, Hawaii car market be darned.
