WELL…. to begin with, Porto must be the most beautiful city in the world. Now that could have been the sunny day, or it could have been the lovely wine at lunch speaking but what a place.

We spent our last day in Porto hiking down to the historic area and over the bridge to Gai….sp. Which is the city across the river from Porto, the place where all of the Port “lodges” are. We were going to tour one of the “lodges” but decided rather to take in the amazing Duoro river sides.

This is the bridge that crosses over and as you can see it has 2 levels you can cross on, the higher one (that the metro crosses, and walkers) and a lower one that cars cross as well as walkers.

As you can see Porto has been built on a rather steep setting, it is just about a KM to the open ocean, so a tidal part of the river Duoro. We had a wonderful lunch across from Porto (so we could get the great pictures) and the man serving us was amazing, he could apparently speak whatever language the customers did and he could also apparently read their minds. He quickly moved us to an area where smoking was not allowed, I said how did you know we did not smoke, he said he could tell. OH and apparently this macdonalds is the most beautiful one in the world.

We have discovered that moreso than Port, Portuguese wines are amazing,…. and cheap. Both whites and reds.

So we went to a wine bar our last night in Porto and met a large group of Americans who had moved over to Porto in the past 3 years. 2 of them were US military and had just decided they could no longer live in the US, because they could not stand the politics, with regards to US foreign policy. They LOVE it here and would never go back. The wife of one the men, had cancer and in the US they had not been able to receive a diagnosis, yet coming here she receives the best possible care, and treatments.

We found the 3 different depictions of women interesting.

Well yesterday we started the camino with the thoughts that we had 25 KM to walk. Since we had walked so much the day before and actually hiked the first several KM of the trail on our way back to hotel, we decided to take an UBER to near the spot we walked to, FOZ. Good thing we did, since (despite cheating in the morning with the UBER) we ended up walking 33 KM on our first day. LOTS of Voltarin cream last night.

Our first camino shell sign of our trip. ( you follow these to know “the way”

Since we are traveling the Portugal coastal camino, it was no surprise that we walked along beaches most of the day. There were heavy rainfall warnings and even some severe rainfall warnings(whenever you go to get directions on Apple Maps they give you the weather warnings. Most of the “trail” is a board walk that stretches for miles, it appears to protect the landscape from erosion and provide a great platform to walk on.

The boards are not slippery as they have many small grooves in them, that I guess allows the water to pour out. While we were not on the boardwalk we were on tiny streets through towns.

There were an assortment of things like this scattered all the way along, I am sure on a dryer day it would have been a great place for picnic. They also have exercise stations with very odd “equipment”, so you can get in shape while you hike the camino 🤨. The boardwalk is not just used by hikers, also people in towns around walking, LOTS of runners, we even had a guy bouncing a basketball following us for ages…

We are currently staying at Hotel Costa Verde, in the town of Pavia de Varzim. The company that did the booking for us listed the Hotel as Costa Verde, rather the Hotel Costa Verde, so we hiked to Costa Verde, which was a LONG ways OFF the path, only to find that there was NO hotel there. From there we had to walk BACK to Hotel Costa Verde, which is basically how we ended up walking so far yesterday. We have also determined that the distances between places on the map are just “rough estimates”, and since we are staying to the north of Pavia de Varzim, that is another reason for the long distance yesterday . The good part of these “estimates” is that today is MUCH shorter, only 20m KM, so I guess the price we paid yesterday we reap today.

What would a blog be without a dog story. THIS is from a restaurant we stopped at yesterday, this little guy was on a LONG leash and doing exactly what Tucker does when he wants something. I guess dogs are pretty international beings. What tucker does when I do not seem to GET what he wants is to push down with his head on my lap (just to make sure I am paying attention.). We miss the guy, but have good reports that he is doing well at Dylan and Sarah’s, and instead of usually following me around like a puppy dog, he is following Sarah.

Thanks for reading, much love, Janet and Ken in Portugal