By Ana Rodriguez Soto - Florida Catholic newspaper

MIAMI | Three years ago, I posted the photo above to my Facebook profile. Today, I leave for my first World Youth Day — at age 57.

The hashtag #nevertoolate seems appropriate, and I thank Facebook for the reminder (God-incidence?)

The good thing is I’m not even the oldest in the group of 115 going as official pilgrims from the Archdiocese of Miami. The priest accompanying the St. Ann Mission group, Father Silverio Rueda, is 68.

A Colombian priest who worked for many years in the Boston Archdiocese, he’s now retired and a veteran of dozens of pilgrimages where he has served as spiritual guide.

It won’t be his first time in Poland and there are others in our group — from Blessed Sacrament in Fort Lauderdale and St. Matthew in Hallandale — who have relatives there.

Many others among our pilgrims have traveled somewhere outside the United States before, as have I. But I think the best prepared are those among us who have been to previous World Youth Days — including Father Bryan Garcia, parochial vicar at St. Andrew Church in Coral Springs. He went to Sydney, Australia in 2008 as a seminarian and is now going as one of our spiritual chaplains.

He and the others probably are better mentally prepared for what I view, with some trepidation, as the true pilgrim experience: the outdoor vigil and all-night campout in the Campus Misericordiae on the outskirts of Krakow.

It’s actually the highlight of WYD: praying with Pope Francis Saturday evening and celebrating Mass with him and about a million of our closest new friends on Sunday morning.

I get it. I’ve just never camped out, anywhere. And I hear it usually rains, just for fun — “holy water,” as Miami’s second archbishop, Edward McCarthy, used to say. It seemed to rain any time he planned a big event outdoors, including the open-air Mass at Tamiami Park with St. John Paul II in 1987. I’m told WYD Madrid 2011 was particularly “blessed.”

That’s where a little voice in my head keeps saying, “You’re gettin’ too old for this.”

Of course, as Auxiliary Bishop Peter Baldacchino pointed out in his send-off homily last Sunday, pilgrimages today are nothing like the pilgrimages of the Middle Ages: No airplanes. No cars. No paved roads. No hotels as we know them. No instant communication or fast food or ATM machines that spit out money in the local currency.

Going on pilgrimage back then meant months of walking and sleeping outdoors — literally putting your life in God’s hands.

Despite our modern comforts, some wonder if the Krakow WYD 2016 pilgrims are doing the same thing, given the news around the world these days.

Father Rueda is reassuring: “We are in the hands of God,” he said when I first met him, at the pilgrims’ final retreat in June. “He will take us and he will bring us back.”

And isn’t that when we make the greatest spiritual progress? When we have no control and only faith for support? Isn’t that when the epiphanies come, and we recognize miracles, and our faith is fortified?

Yeah, I’m too old for this. But then again, no one’s ever too old for that.

You can follow the pilgrims on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram by using the hashtag #WYDMiami16. I will post my reports, as often as I can, on the archdiocesan website, www.miamiarch.org.