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Last night was a quiet dinner with a Portuguese cyclist, Lara (Germany) and the albergue owner Diogo. Laura has knee pain and has had to end her Camino now. It happens.

We have another big day today, 27K but it is flat. Today we will cross the bridge in Valença, Portugal to Tui, Spain. Also when we enter Spain, their time is 1 hour ahead.

After crossing the bridge, the rains came. We thought we would get a cafe stop in Tui but the Camino trail skirted the central part of the town where unknowingly to us were the only cafes. At that point it became another forced march in the rain to get to our first cafe stop 17K later.

We met a friendly guy name Henrik (Denmark) on the walk who was just doing a five day walk with a tour company since he had time off. He likes the fact that you meet people from all over the world just walking the Camino.

After our cafe stop we were in better spirits. Fair to say that we broke one of our Camino rules which is only one person can be cranky at a time. It happens.

It was a long day. We left at 07:00 and arrived around 16:00. The albergue we are at (Casucho da peregrina) is newer and has everything we need, including a washer, dryer and a hair dryer!

“Once the travel bug bites, there is no known antidote. I know I will be happily infected for the rest of my life”….Michael Palin

Today we continued to climb. We will do 18K today but we will have our biggest elevation gain of 537 meters and loss of 632 meters.

It was a technical climb on rocks which was a nice change for us. The downhill was not bad.

Once we got out of the forest we got to enjoy our second breakfast of the day.

The rest of the day was a nice mix of road surfaces and interesting things to see on the way.

Here’s Beth again being the toll collector on a old Roman bridge.

We finished our short walk today and called it a day at Quinta de Estrada Romana. Cool looking place with a bit of a hippie vibe.

There will be another communal dinner here tonight. It’ll probably be vegetarian. Mmmmm yummy. Peace out.

“One’s destination is never a place but a new way of seeing things”….Henry Miller

Last night we met all the peregrinos staying at Casa da Fernanda. There was Catherine & Blaine (Kansas), Clo and Jules (UK), Thomas and Sasha (Germany), Maria, Diette and Bodai (Denmark), Yasmine (Australia), Francis & Sarah (Michigan) and Ginger (Vancouver). After meet and greet appetizers by Fernanda, we headed inside for dinner followed by a Camino sing a long.

We got a late start (08:00) for todays 23K walk since we stayed for breakfast before leaving. The morning walk was spectacular. It was a mix of farm trails, gravel roads, etc. Everything we saw was worth stopping to take a picture.

After our morning cafe stops there was still cool things to see.

For lunch we arrived in Ponte de Lima. Ginger stopped by as well and bought herself a birthday cake. Ponte de Lima is a cool little city.

After lunch it was more interesting landscape and then the final ascent into Valada where we are staying in bunk room with Marshall from Netherlands who is walking from southern Portugal.

“Of all the paths you take in life, make sure some of them are in dirt”….John Muir

Last night we shared a nice tapas meal at Bistro Vigor.

Today’s walk was suppose to be an easy 20K but it rained on us all day. It was more like a forced march.

At one point we actually came across a new road being put down and they are using cobblestones! WTF. Enough with the cobbles!

We left later today around 7:30 and made it to Casa Fernanda albergue at 1:30. We are staying in a bunk house with 10 beds.

At the end of every walk it’s a real grind and somehow the next day we recover enough to walk on.

Another borderline interesting thing peregrinos do is at cafe stops is to sit outside and take our boots and socks off usually once or twice a day. Then before leaving we smother our toes with Vaseline again. You got to show your feet some love.

“The man who goes alone can start today, but he who travels with another must wait until the other is ready”….Henry David Thoreau

Today’s walk was a long, hard 29K. The scenery was nice. We were amongst a lot of agriculture ….vineyards, corn, etc.

We got out by 07:00 again and walked in off and on rain most of the morning. Maurice (Brazil) was with us off and on at the beginning. There was an old stone bridge that we crossed together. Awesome photo stop.

Seeing a bit more pereginos now. There were a couple of girls from Poland that we kept leap frogging along the walk.

We finally hobbled into Barcelos to a private room we are staying in around 4:00 pm. The cobbles are brutal on our feet. This was the farthest we ever walked and we have no intention to ever do this again.

“Take only memories, leave only footprints”…..Chief Seattle

Todays’s walk was an uninspiring 27K walk on either sidewalk or cobbles. We left Porto just before 07:00 and saw some new peregrinos along the way but not many. We did meet an older Portuguese man going through one town that walked with us a little bit and was very kind.

Around midday we stopped under a shaded area where another peregrino was resting. Luiz is from Porto and this is his first walking Camino. Previously he biked it and he was intrigued to see how walking it would be.

Sometime around 3:00 pm we got to Vilarinho (the town that fun forgot). Our albergue which is a small mix of private rooms and a bunk room. Beth and I are staying in a private room today which should help getting out in the morning without worrying about disturbing others.

The morning routine consists of taping our feet to prevent blisters and smothering our toes in Vaseline. We sleep in the clothes we are going to walk in. Then load the backpack which is a compression bag of our clothes and a clear plastic bag of toiletries or medical stuff.

We stopped at a mini Mercado on the way in to be able to make sandwiches as we weren’t sure of the food situation in this one horse town. We will be having ham, salami and cheese on a PORTUGUESE ROLL in Portugal!

“When you follow the crowd you lose yourself. When you follow your soul, you lose the crowd….”

We started our rest day by climbing the streets of Porto to go to the laundromat…..good times.

Afterwards, we made our way down to the Se Cathedral to see inside.

Turned out there was a tower we could climb which had outstanding views of Porto.

We then decided to make our way down to the touristy river walk.

Then we had to climb our way back up to where our hotel was and unsurprisingly getting a bit lost as well. Overall, we walked over 5 miles by 1:00 pm. We thought we should give our feet a break and take a nap.

“Wanderlust: a strong desire for or an impulse to wander or travel and explore the world”.

We went for a stroll to find something for dinner and bumped into Andrew and Jessie (Australia) and had a glass of wine and got caught up. Neither one of us has seen a peregrino in days.

Thank you all for your comments. We need the inspiration and laughs to keep us moving forward.

Today we walked a hilly 28.5K to get to Porto. We got started at 07:00. The first 8K was walking on small 2 foot sidewalks with the wall of a home on one side and cars buzzing by us through small streets with blind curves on the other.

Once the morning rush hour was over we settled into a nicer walk with a mix of streets and woods. Our goal today was to manage our breaks better as we have more options with cafe availability now. We took breaks every 1.5 hours to help our feet and it helped.

The cobbles really beat up our feet.

We experienced the bread delivery guy again. An unmarked white van comes into town leaning on his horn then parks and women come out of their homes where there is a lot of exchanging of cash for bags of bread. It’s like a drug deal going down and then onto the next village.

It seemed to take forever to get to the Porto bridge at the end of the day but was such a cool city once we got there.

We stopped by the Se Cathedral on our way to our hotel. The city is swarming with tourists.

We went out to replace clothes we lost and again trying to find a place to eat. We got lost both times. . This city is a maze of streets running in every directions with hills everywhere. By the time we figure this place out we’ll be gone.

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it – Ferris Bueller

We had a community dinner with the albergue owner Paulo, his wife, Anya (Holland), and a cyclist Kristen (Germany). Kristen is cycling the Camino in the opposite direction. We all had the best night sleep so far. We got started a bit late at 7:15..

Today’s walk is a hilly 26K day. Many steep climbs today. We did run into a bunch of peregrinos we know at cafe stops. Those stops are necessary for us to get off our feet and also to have some laughs.

You find shade wherever you can find it. We stopped off at the public washing station in one town to take a break. We are seeing more of these now.

We finished our walk around 3:45 and we are smashed. The last 5K really was a grind. No accommodations in this area but a hotel. We prefer albergues but when you’re really beat up it’s nice to have your own room. We are also finding out now we are missing some sock liners and my shirt. All the clothes were taken off the clothes line when it rained 2 days ago and there were clothes hanging everywhere under cover trying to get dry and we somehow missed them. Lesson learned. We head to Porto tomorrow and will have a rest day which now will turn into a clothes shopping day. Yeah!

“Wherever you go, there you are….Confucius

Last night rained a lot so our laundry never got dried. Yuk.

Then we lost power for hours until someone questioned this and the albergue person in charge said to just flip the circuit breaker. Shouldn’t that be their job?

We were hanging out in the common room with Andrew and Jessie (Australia) and Larry and Monique (Canada) telling old Camino stories. Then Monique goes and gets her ukulele she has in her pack and starts singing songs for us. Slowly more people start coming in and we are having a sing a long. She even played “Country Roads” which was a big hit. Felt fortunate to be apart of it all.

Today’s walk was 23.5K to Casa Catolic in Branca. It rained off and on today but we felt fortunate that we didn’t get caught in a massive deluge that was only a short distance away.

We kept seeing Ilsa (Belgium) today off and on at various cafe stops. She is such a friendly person. It feels good to meet people like this that just enjoy the moment. We also walked quite a bit with Kako (Japan). She is 75 years old and we barely keep up with her. We are pathetic.

There was no point trying to get to the albergue and try to get laundry done again since it was still raining so we found a self service laundromat off of the Camino but close to our albergue. There were a few Portuguese in there when I stripped down to my underwear to get my dirtiest clothes cleaned. I had a clean shirt and pants that I was able to change into right away. Beth did give me stink eye when I dropped my shorts.

There is only a few of us here tonight so it should be a quiet night instead of the hootenanny we had last night. Our bodies are breaking down. Two more long walks until our rest day in Porto.

“A mind that is stretched by a new experience, can never go back to its old dimensions”…..Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr