Day: April 13, 2025

This is for our neighbor Brian. Brian said he was looking forward to photos of storks and cranes. We have yet to see any of those (not even a nest) but think we will soon. Yesterday, walking along the huge Minho River that we were about to cross from Portugal to Spain, we spotted this Spoonbill. I didn’t know that’s what it was at the time, had to look it up. If I’m wrong in the identification, I hope my bird-savvy friends will set me straight.

He/she was very busy hunting in the water for food. So, Brian, I thought of you when I saw this. Hope it will hold you over till we spot a stork.

• Camino walking: A Garda to Viladesuso, 10.8 miles in 5:34 hours, 4:04 moving
• Elevation: up 509 feet, down 587 feet, fairly hilly. Wynette’s watch says 46 flights of stairs climbed.
• Total walking: 11.42 miles
• Boardwalks: none
• Bags transported via Correos (Spanish mail): 1. We decided to try their backpack transport service. It worked very well. I was carrying about 10 pounds and Wynette didn’t have a pack at all.
• Buddha statues passed: 1
• It was Palm Sunday and we were worried about getting breakfast on the trail. But we found a place and got our usual eggs and toast.

Bread delivery to private homes is a thing in Spain.

We have seen this many times before but what we saw before was a baguette in a plastic bag hanging on a door knob or a fence. This is the first time we have seen a tube specifically for bread delivery.

Notice the inside of the coffee cup has the brand of coffee the bar uses. Sometimes the branding is on the outside or on the saucer. We see this all the time. I assume the coffee wholesaler gives them discounts on the cups and saucers.

Wynette likes her coffee milky and not too hot so she usually goes up and asks them to add some leche fria. Today they gave her a little pitcher of milk and it had branding on it.

We buy milk frequently for our in-hotel dinners and often get the Pascual milk.

We are still on the Portuguese Camino but yesterday we moved to the Spanish part of it. The two countries maintain the Camino in different ways. In Spain you see these posts a lot.

They always have the distance to Santiago on them. Here it is 151,560 kilometers. The Europeans use a decimal comma where we would use a period but more to the point: three places of accuracy? 151,561 would be one meter farther. Is that to the front door of the cathedral, or the alter, or the highest point on the roof? It just seems nutty to have this much accuracy. I wonder how the decision was made?

Also notice the little stones on top of the post (and a flower). We talked about the stones in an earlier post.

We see this a lot: a dual use walking and bicycle lane with. 10 km/hour bicycle speed limit. The pedestrian seems to be striding so purposefully.

Just the usual don’t do this and be careful about that except the text is Galician, which seems to be more like Portuguese than like Spanish.

It was a long walk today. About 11 miles from start to finish. A little longer than we like to walk and some up and down, but it wasn’t too bad.

It was one of the prettiest days we’ve had walking. The scenery, the weather, the ever-changing path.

The Litoral is the Camino we’ve been trying to stay on because it is usually close to the shore. But it isn’t well marked. The Coastal (strangely) is a little further inland, hillier, more established, with much better way marks. Today the Coastal and Litoral coincided all day. Hence it was an easy day to navigate: yellow arrows pointed the way at every turn. Less stress.

Also, we are trying something new. As we’ve mentioned in blogs of previous years, Charlie generously carries more than twice as much as I do. About 25 pounds for him and 10 for me. Starting last Camino he said it was getting hard (or at least not fun) to carry that weight and maneuver rocky, rooty, steep trails. Yesterday he said (to paraphrase many discussions) “I hoped I’d make it to 80 before we did pack transfer, but I’m more nervous about falling now and I think I’d enjoy the walks more without this heavy pack. Let’s try it.” So, we set it up last night and did it today for the first time.

The Spanish postal service (Correos) has a great service where they’ll take your pack from one town to the next. Cost is 7 euros per bag. You leave it at the hotel you are leaving and then find it waiting for you at the hotel you arrive at. It worked perfectly today.

We only carried what we needed for the day: rain gear, cool weather gear, some snacks, water bottles, first aid, my hiking poles. Charlie carried all that in his pack. We filled my pack with all our other stuff and that’s what got transferred via Correos. So, I didn’t carry anything but my waist pack. It was really nice to not have the weight on our backs.

It did take us a frustrating hour yesterday afternoon figuring out the Correos website to set up the transfer and having to make a phone call because of a glitch. But, we finally got it going. It’ll be easy from now on.