Nicole Bukaty is a secondary school French and Spanish teacher in Crieff, Scotland. Originally from Kraków, Poland, she grew up in London and France, and has lived in Colombia, Spain and Russia. She has a BA Joint Honours degree in Philosophy and Hispanic Studies and an MA in Philosophy, both from King's College, London. She obsessively uses up her holidays and weekends to hike mountains or take on long-distance walks, totalling over 7000km so far, predominantly on pilgrim routes. She has even completed 450km all on asphalt from her mother's house in Ilawa, Poland, to the Polish monastery of Jasna Góra in Czestochowa. She is the author of the Vía de la Plata and Camino Sanabrés guidebook, and co-author of the Via Francigena in the South of Italy guidebook for Cicerone. Her next projects include books on Scotland and Norway.