Author: Wynette

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.

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.

After our huge apartment last night, tonight we are in a very small garret room with sloping ceilings on the third floor. Two flights of spiral staircases to get there and the shared bathroom is down one flight. Luckily only one other person to share it with.

The owner, Horatio is such a charming man, we won’t be able to do anything but leave him a terrific review. He really is quite wonderful.

The place has a washer and dryer (dryers in people’s homes are very rare in Spain, I’m not sure about Portugal) so that’s worth a lot.

And Horacio just gave us some cookies with quince jam (he calls it marmalade) that he said he made yesterday. Delicious. He told us he gives marmalade to all his pilgrims.

After two days of walking inland, we were glad to be back on the ocean today. It was still a hot and sunny day with no shade, but there was some breeze off the water which really helped. It was low tide while we were walking. We saw a few people here and there down in the tide pools. We assume they were digging for clams. The beaches today were very rocky. I hate to admit it, but we have yet to put our feet in the ocean.

This morning we had a very long bridge crossing over the Limia River. Going into Viana do Castelo. If you look really hard you might be able to see the castle on the hill.

It amazes me how many huge rivers there are in this part of the world that we never heard of. Of course, we are very near the mouth of the river, probably its widest point.

We haven’t mentioned food as much as usual in our blog this year. We’ve had some good meals but only a few extraordinary ones. But this salad in today’s lunch was amazing. I’m not sure if the photo above makes it look good. It had greens, lentils, onions, mango, walnuts, avocado, and mashed sweet potato.

We also had a pea and chorizo soup (photo below) and it was delicious as well. Lighter than we expected.

This photo was taken shortly after we started out this morning, a little after 7:00. I wanted to post this so it’s clear that the Camino isn’t all forest paths and boardwalks and charming villages! But we haven’t had to do too much highway walking.

We thought we were staying in a regular hotel tonight but turns out it is a bunch of apartments. There was a problem with the first one they put us in so they moved us to one that has three bedrooms, three bathrooms, a huge living room and kitchen and a huge balcony. Whew! A lot more than we need, but no complaints. The place is further away from restaurants, etc. than we wanted to walk, and the grocery store where we planned to pick up some food was closed. But the hotel sold us some frozen meals that we heated in the microwave in the kitchen. They turned out to be quite good. A bean/rice dish and a cod/vegetable casserole dish. We plan to eat the breakfast food they gave us for dinner (ham/cheese sandwiches, fruit, and cereal). Then will get breakfast on the trail tomorrow. So … we certainly aren’t starving.

Weather.com said it was 82 here today. That feels very hot when you are hiking in mostly sun and it’s humid. Whew, I cannot imagine doing a Camino in summer. This one about did me in today. Yesterday and today all the hiking was a bit inland and much more hilly.

Just about when I was thinking “we don’t have enough water” and “man, I wonder what happens when you get heat stroke” we came across a Camino angel rest area. Cold drinks in tubs, hot coffee (no way!), fruit, etc. And a place to drop some coins for what you take. Charlie and I had two bottles of cold water. Heavenly. And we had a nice rest in the shade.

We have one more hot day tomorrow (not quite as hot as today) and then many days of rain in the forecast. I’ll probably be the only one not complaining about that.