Portuguese Coastal, Part of the Primitivo, Week in Vigo
I am a fan of interesting or unusual signs. Here is one from our elevator.
I puzzled over the icon in the upper right, not sure what it was prohibiting. I think I figured it out but I’m not sure. I encourage readers to give their opinion on the comments.
The lower right icon: I think I know what it is. They say that about all elevators although normally before you get on.
Easy to add and in my opinion better than a traditional bidet. I used it myself and I liked it. I am missing my washlet from home. The downside is that the water is not heated.
Today we started walking from Porto along the coast. Almost the whole way we were walking on boardwalks.
Boardwalks are pleasant to walk on, much nicer than pavement and not as hard as sand. There were some pilgrims but mostly local people. Periodically there are places to stop and rest.
More the benches discourage laying down presumably to prevent sleeping. But often you see these maybe by a different department.
And even this.
I’m not too sure the wire cables would make a comfortable hammock.
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.
The Madrid Airport is huge. My watch told me that we walked 2.4 miles while we were there. Some of that was on moving sidewalks where you feel you are flying. Most of that 2.4 miles was getting from our arrival gate to the departure gate for our next flight. That didn’t count the little train ride we took to change from the international terminal to the non-international terminal. The walking felt good after being cooped up on the plane for over 8 hours. But I’m always surprised how much walking one must do in the Madrid airport. I don’t remember seeing anyone who was in a wheel chair or being driven around. Maybe there are other ways for those who need help to go?
Well, we’re doing it again. This time we are starting in Porto and will walk the Camino Portuguese. We walked it in 2016. In 2016 we walked the Central Route. This time we are walking the Coastal or Litoral Route, which has gotten very popular lately. We plan to end the Portuguese Route a few days before we get to Santiago and switch to the Camino Primitivo and walk the second half of that. In the menu above select “GMap of Route” to see our whole route.
This is a map of our first two days. 1. Matosinhos (suburb of Porto) to Labruge and 2. Labruge to Povoa de Varzim.