Wynchar Camino 2025

Walking today we ran across some street maintenance.

I got to thinking about how low-tech cobblestones are. The stones look easy enough to make. We saw some being installed: they just grab one, place it in the sand, and tap it with a hammer to position it. No hot tar. No big cement truck. No waiting for it to dry. It is a cheap and easy way to maintain streets and sidewalks. And small repairs are easy. And, they last a long long time.

On the downside they are not as nice to walk on as asphalt or cement in terms of tripping.

According to ChatGPT true cobblestones are not cut or shaped but collected. What I have been talking about are setts or Belgian stones.

The pilgrim ahead of Charlie in the above photo was a very nice young woman from Slovakia. She was friendly when she was walking beside us and we struck up a conversation. When we exchanged details about where we were from I said “New Mexico” and she misunderstood and thought I said “Mexico” and assumed I spoke Spanish. She was excited because she wanted to practice her Spanish. She said she hadn’t been able to use it much in Portugal. We chatted a bit in Spanish and somehow she finally figured out that we were from the US, not Mexico. At one point she said “I really admire you walking the Camino at your age.” (We hadn’t talked about how old we were.) Not long after that, she said her goodbyes and sped ahead. I guess this old woman was a little too slow for her. I got a grin out of that exchange.

On caminos in Spain, they have concrete kilometer posts and people often leave stones on them. Sometimes people bring stones from home or pick them up along the trail. Each stone has a meaning to the person leaving it. Often they write something on the stone. This seems to be a Camino Portuguese variant of this. This is the only one we’ve seen so far.

The boardwalk passed the Estela Golf Club today. We were watching some players and the woman shouted a “bom Caminho” at us. We got about a dozen of those today.

In my youth I wasted a lot of my precious time on Earth watching golf on TV. Youthful indiscretion. But I did learn that on seaside golf courses, like Pebble Beach, putts break towards the ocean, or maybe it was away from the ocean. That made me think of the old joke about heaven and hell not being that different. In heaven you get to play golf all day and in hell you have to watch golf all day.

I think this is a ping pong table. I’m not sure if it was supposed to be this way or it warped. In any case it might be interesting to play. Then I thought that you could have a table that was constantly changing curvature in random ways. Would that favor the offense or the defense?

That’s me and Wynette in the corner but we’re not losing our religion.

We’re having a lot of fun. Finally remembered to take a selfie.

• Walked on Camino: Povoa de Varzim to Apulia, 8.9 miles, 4 hours
• Total walked: 10.39 miles
• Seaside golf courses passed: 1, see post on this
• Amazing lunches: 1. We went to the closest place near our albergue and the lunch was great.
• Dirt for sale places passed: 1. It was great looking black dirt, I would have bought it.
• Albergues stayed at: 1. Up to now we have stayed at hotels but tonight we are in a private room in an albergue. It is fun to be around other pilgrims
• Bon caminho (good camino) and bon dia (good morning) greetings from the natives: 12 .

We stopped at a bar and I wanted something cold to drink. Found this in the cold case. A new one for me! It wasn’t bad. I wished it had more milk in it because it was a bit too sweet. Charlie said I should have asked the person tending the bar for some milk to add to it. I often ask for more milk in my coffee. But I felt rather shy about asking for more milk in my apple juice.

Most of the places we’ve stopped at have been clearly beach restaurants. But this one was a funky old-fashioned bar, my favorite kind, a block or two off the boardwalk. There weren’t as many places to stop today so we were glad we found this one.

You can probably tell from the above photo we aren’t roughing it too much. We are staying in a place called Home of Pilgrims. It’s a large house that once was a private home. There are a mixture of private rooms, shared rooms, and one large dormitory room with 6 or 8 beds. Probably about 20 people in all. We have one of the private rooms with private bath so can’t complain. It’ll be fun to run into the other pilgrims at dinner in the large kitchen.

Seems strange to refer to ourselves as “pilgrims”. We are pretty much just on a walking holiday and that’s what the Camino Portuguese Coastal feels like, as opposed to our first Camino, the Camino Frances, which in many ways did feel like a spiritual pilgrimage.

We both recently got smart watches Apple and Pixel. We use them to keep track of distances walked. We each have phones, of course, “i” and Pixel.

We are using the “Wise Pilgrim” app which is really nice. Mainly we use the map which shows the Camino path with all the variations. This makes it easy to stay on course. There are not as many yellow arrows on the Portuguese. There are two main paths, the central and the coastal. We walked the central in 2016 and now we are on the coastal. But there is a variant of the coastal called the litoral which consists of alternative routes to the coastal closer to the ocean. It can get complex.

I have the iOS version which shows where you are with a yellow arrow, as you see in the middle of the photo. Camino appropriate I guess. The Android version uses the Google blue dot. And I take my 11” iPad. For me, it is worth carrying the extra pound. And we take a lightweight Bluetooth keyboard that Wynette uses to type on her phone.

Luckily, just about everything charges with USB-C, except for my air buds and the keyboard. We purchased power blocks for European plugs which is nicer than using converters.