We are in Portugal!

We arrived in Vigo, Spain, around 5:00 pm (Spain time) on Thursday. Despite lack of sleep, we managed to purchase bus tickets for the next day and Vodafone SIM cards for our phones. (Huge amount of fast data and unlimited phone calls for about $16 each for 4 weeks.) And then eat a pretty delicious Indian food feast. And then crash, finally. Friday morning we got on a bus and headed south for Porto, Portugal. About a 3 hour bus ride. We spent last night in Matosinhos, just north of Porto, and then started out walking today. My watch tells me we have walked 9.82 miles and 25,628 steps, so far, today. And only the equivalent of 10 flights of stairs. A very flat walk, totally along the ocean, 90% on boardwalks. About half of those flights of stairs, I think, have been in our B&B for the night, going up and down to our second floor room. Right now we are sitting at a large table on the lower floor doing our first blogs of this trip.

You can see from the photo that the weather has been nice. Cool, breezy. It started out cloudy and drizzly but cleared up early.

Our packs felt heavy walking. For the past couple of years we’ve hiked in the Sandia foothills near Albuquerque 2 or 3 times a week. That is a lot more up and down but not as far, but maybe our packs were not quite as heavy as today. We’ll get tougher soon, I’m sure.

I’m frustrated not being able to speak the language here in Portugal but I’m good at saying “Fala ingles?” (Do you speak English?) And almost everyone says “yes”. The Portuguese have been so kind and helpful.