North Kerry woman raises over €2k for vital Rescue charity with Camino De Santiago walk

The North Kerry woman was enjoying her last day in Spain on Thursday when she spoke to The Kerryman about her 115km long trek along a leg of the famed Camino de Santiago.

The aim of the walk was to raise vital funds for the local Ballybunion Sea & Cliff Rescue service charity and with Lisa set to break the €2,000 mark for the amount raised, it’s safe to say that it’s been a job very well done for the charity driven trekker.

“The legs are fine but the feet are sore alright. I got blisters along the way so I’ve been a bit bandaged up for a couple of days, but sure I kept going anyway,” she said with a laugh.

“It was probably as hard as I thought it was going to be. You don’t really know or realise until you do it that it is a lot packed into five days. Now that the feet are cooling down though, I’m able to appreciate more that it is a great thing to have done,” she continued

“The first day 34 degrees so all of us in the group, we were thinking ‘if it continues like this for the week, we’re going to be dead’ . We were just downing the water and at one stage, the sun cream wasn’t even sticking,” she laughed.

“We were lucky then that it cooled down significantly the second day by about 10 degrees so it was mid-20’s so we were fine with that,” Lisa continued.

“I think because we were in such a big group - there was 88 of us - that we kept each other going. It definetely helped having nice people around you. They slowed down when you needed to and just helping keep you going,” Lisa added.

Going on, she said that she hadn’t said it to anyone on the walk that she was doing it for charity but that the company that was in charge of the walk, they shared The Kerryman’s article on it which meant that word quickly got around Lisa’s walking group.

“It was on maybe the third day of walking that they [UWalk] shared the article and one of the girls in the group came running up to me asked if I was the girl doing for charity. I was like ‘uh yeah, how do you know?’ said Lisa with a laugh.

“It was really nice, everyone in the group was supportive of it,” she added.

Lisa said that the generosity of people towards her fundraiser has been amazing to see and with people even stopping her parents on the streets back in Ballybunion asking them how she’s getting on with the walk.

“They’re a local cause and the people that do the work, they’re only volunteers giving up their time to it which I think is a big reason why people want to support them,” she said.

As for any future walks along the Camino, Lisa stopped short of committing herself to the full thing but did mention that there’s a few other Camino walks she’d love to do, including one in Portugal.

The link to donate to Lisa’s fundraiser is still open online here https://www.idonate.ie/fundraiser/BallybunionSeaRescue-LisaOMahony?fbclid=IwAR2hmTTG823Tsq5eZosv5yZDNpNpiMP_06TnggYMOhGRQGGPJaWgdCdbY4Y with her workplace already having pledged an extra €500 donation.