Day: April 11, 2025

We are staying in a large house that has been converted 100% to guestrooms. Very nice, very comfortable. (No garret rooms with spiral staircases leading to the bathroom.) An amazing kitchen for our use. Heavenly. We are sitting in the front room. This is our blogging spot for the evening.

We love the boardwalks. They’re nice to walk on and, this is not a property of boardwalks per se but it is true for this walk, they are by the ocean. We think there will be boardwalks all along the coastal trail, so for five or six more days.

We read that some of them get covered with sand. Sand is much harder to walk on.

You can see how deep it gets, even covering the boardwalk posts.

Today we walked some with steps.

Hundreds of miles of boardwalks must be quite a maintenance problem.

The upside is that this creates work that AIs can’t do (yet).

Our deck at home is fake wood but these seem to be treated, real wood. You can see lots of knots.

They mostly are by the ocean.

Sometimes through woods and by golf courses.

Of course, I really wanted to make some reference to the Drifters “Under the Boardwalk” but these boardwalks don’t have anything underneath them like some SoCal boardwalks.

• Camino walking: Carreço to Villa Praia de Âncora, 9.2 miles in 5:57 hours
• Altitudes: 272 feet up and 302 feet down (26 flights of stairs)
• Total walking: 10.88 miles
• Times we retraced our steps: 3, our Wise Pilgrim app had some small errors. We were already in a field when the path ended and it was getting boggy.
• Dinners from the ALDI: 1, we have a beautiful kitchen here so we bought a lot of food for dinner. We were hungry when we were shopping so we got a bit extra but not too bad.
• Boardwalk walking: ~25%, we finally got back to some boardwalks, some were inundated with sand.
• Today the cool weather came and the walking was much nicer. We even had a little rain. It looks like rain, off and on, for the next week.

Charlie and I’ve been using an app called Wise Pilgrim that shows you a map of the path and where you are on the path. We really need it, or something like it, for this Camino because it is a fairly new Camino and the yellow way markers (the famous yellow arrows) are not anywhere close to adequate. The app’s maps have taken us exactly where we expected so far but today was crazy. A few times, the real path was different from what he showed us on the map. In one case, the one on his map fizzled out in the middle of a boggy field. And one path he showed as a path was barely a path at all. We ended up backtracking several times and going way out of our way at one point. This all turned what we thought was going to be one of our shorter days (6.5 miles) into a pretty normal day distance-wise (9 miles).

Also, there were no services, so we walked over 8 miles before taking a break or having anything to eat, except I took a caffeine pill near the beginning. We were fine not eating but I was really tired after walking 8 miles without a break. Sure glad to come to that first cafe.

Some of the walking was along the ocean, but much of it was a little bit inland. We probably changed types of surface two dozen or more times. I’ll show some examples below.

We were glad it wasn’t hot today. Comfortable temperatures. Humid, with off-and-on rain. (We are loving our Altus rain jacket/ponchos. Easy to take on and off.)

Horatio met us as we were heading out this morning and wanted to take photos of us. Here we are in front of his amazing azalea bush.

Here’s a selfie he took of the three of us.