After days of rain, LOTS of rain, water seems to be flowing everywhere, cool CLEAR water. There is something about deep clear water that always makes me stop to ponder, how nice it would be to jump in. The trails do not seem to be damaged, but then again, many of them have been here for hundreds of years. There IS evidence of repair from erosion in places though.
Yesterday was a lovely day, slightly cloudy but no rain. I guess the ground water is catching its way along all of the tiny creeks to the bigger waterways to the ocean now.
Every hike we have done we have had rain, I feel that any country that is experiencing a drought should invite Ken and I there to do a lengthy hike…
I always find it interesting how water is diverted, collected and then directed with rock.
As rock hounds, I must say we have walked for ??200 KM so far over lots of rocks and we have seen nothing of interest to us. it seems as thought it is just granite everywhere. There ARE interesting things they seem to do with granite here, they seem to use it where we might use treated lumber. They seem to make fences and stakes for grapevines with granite… certainly will last longer.
I am guessing, more granite here, less trees? There seems to be lovely forests, but I guess logging is not as much of a thing if you have granite? Buildings made with concrete, or rocks, or bricks. There was a time change between Portugal and Northern Spain, even though we were just going north, so the sun is now rising at 8:40 and we are starting out at about 8.
So today we do that final 16 KM into Santiago de Compestela. Although we did a different Camino 6 years ago, we did not walk into Santiago, as we had become quite ill 3 days prior to our arrival, so we had to take a bus into the city. So, fingers crossed today we hope to walk into the city.
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
We arrived in Portugal yesterday AM after an overnight flight.
I think it is fair enough to totally write off the first day of a trip to Europe because it seems that there is always an over night flight flying east. So glad we have 3 days prior to starting our Portugal camino.
I am going to tell about our first 2 issues coming into the country, only as a means of alerting others, so as not to make the same mistakes as us.
First of all, totally exhausted we ended up at customs with several very large flights arriving at the same time and two very large areas of customs. We started into one area and the lady told us Canada, US Europe passports etc. So we got into this huge lineup, it said electronic passports. We were pretty sure that we had “electronic” passports since we have the new Canadian passports which include a large plastic page that seems pretty fool proof. Since it seems like a large credit card page we thought YES these will be the ultimate in “electronic”. We after a very long line of the back and forth sort where you face the same people again and again as you work your way to the front. As we were going through the line, I commented to Ken, that I wondered what was the difference between the two areas of lineup….. We got to the front of the line and this lady noticed our “NEW” “Canadian” passports .. and she said OH no, these machines do not handle the new Canadian passports. Then she announced to all of the other people in line this little “detail” about the new Canadian passports, and we were directed to area 5, which was the “traditional” customs area where you walk up to a guy and he asks you questions. This lineup was even longer. I told myself…. relax, you KNEW that the first day was a write off. 🤨
The next “event” I am not including as a negative against Portugal, but as a warning that might prevent anyone else from …. being as dumb as we were. As usual we got our first scam out of the way to begin with early. I guess being up all night, as well as being a little overwhelmed with a totally foreign language, we were ideal subjects. The first question the guy in the airport asked was “first time to Portugal?” which I think was important …. We were looking for the transit to get to the very large BUS station in Lisbon, which was 3 KM from airport. Under usual circumstances, we likely would have just walked, given that we ARE here for a Camino hike. When the guy approached us saying Taxi? We sort of turned him down but when ken asked him how much to get to BUS station he said it was under 10 Euros. I guess we thought, what the heck, let’s indulge ourselves. We SHOULD have been alerted when we got outside and there were lots of taxis waiting, but he had obviously contacted his taxi guy. I guess we SHOULD have known at this point that something was up. To begin with we had thought he WAS the taxi driver. It was all downhill from there. The Taxi finally pulled up and the guy helped us into the taxi. I was following the direction we were going on my phone, and we seemed to be going in the opposite direction, and I commented. Although Ken was attempting to talk to him in his rudimentary Portugese, he clearly only seemed to know a few words of English. We finally got to the BUS station and he turned to give us the fee amount, and we had our 10 Euro prepared, but he used his phone to show us that the fee was 246 Euro. We very quickly woke up and told him in so many many words…. words apparently wasted on him because our words were all in English. Ken was a bit confused as to whether it was pounds, or Euros…. I quickly calculated that this was about 450 dollars Canadian. It WAS 3 KM, and our luggage was in the trunk… which I usually never do. OMG!! Ken made it clear that we only had about 15 euros and 15 pounds sterling. The guy started saying that he was going to take us back to airport and contact the police. We asked if we could talk to his “boss” the guy that we had originally been lured into this “taxi”. He contacted this guy on the phone and suddenly the guy from the airport who spoke perfect English did not understand any English…🤨🤨
I guess I figured that this guy was not going to do us any harm, but I was most concerned about our luggage in the trunk, so I asked him to open trunk, ……. and he did. We gave him all the cash we had, which was about 15 euros and 15 pounds. Got out luggage and left. My theory was that this guy thought we were dumber than we actually were, which was pretty dumb already. He gathered that we would be paying with credit cards AND that we were not familiar with how the pricing was written out. It can be kind of confusing between commas and periods.
I guess our lesson which we should have known is not to respond to anything the guys lurking, and coming up to you in the airport, are selling.
We got to the bus station and caught the bus from Lisbon to Porto, which I realized later was a wee bit aggressive for the first day. We arrived in Porto about 5 KM from our hotel and it was absolutely pouring rain. Long story shortened, we caught the metro to the area near the hotel, walked 1KM in pouring rain to get to a lovely hotel.
Pretty darned wet….. For a variety of reasons we took very few pictures on our first day and I guess I wish Ken had not take THIS ONE.
We had a lovely dinner of Cod and potatoes, and although we have looked forward to some great local Port, now that we are in Porto, we decided to wait another day until we have had maybe 12 hours more sleep.
Today bright and perky, and ready to face the day, and buy umbrellas. I must say I have never seen so many umbrellas in my life.
As luck would have it, we are 20+ hours drive from home and as you can see from photo….. each direction has severe storm warning 🤔. To top that off, we are at Lake Mead and the wind is howling at 20 mph. White caps….
Yesterday it was closer to 30 MPH and so we spent the whole day indoors. I should point out that we love our Motorhome and it is plenty big enough for us, however the size IS dependant on going outdoors during the day. It IS a small space to spend 24 hours.
What to do? Make sourdough….
NAP…. manoman am I ever bored….
BOOOOOOrrrrrreeeed
Or maybe work on Blog,…. 🙂
We are at Stewarts point …. a far east and north part of Lake Mead. Lake Mead is the reservoir created by the Hoover dam, and is a massive lake. It HAS been much more massive in previous years, and less massive last year when we were here.
We have been gone now for 2.5 months and are looking for a route to get home. Big storm across the west coast all the way, it seems, from Canada down into California. Apparently the Sierra Nevadas got 10 feet of snow. I am sure that Lake Mead WILL be much higher when all that snow starts to melt. But we only got wind and just a little bit of rain.
We have had a great winter, with a few exception type situations, but cannot really complain. In Fact I even have a funny story to tell about the day the transmission went in our jeep.
make no mistake it WAS a bad day…… We were going into Yuma from where we were camping, Ogilby road which is about 20 minutes drive out of Yuma. We just got into Yuma and Ken realized that he could not get the jeep in gear and with a whole lot of finagling, he managed to get the us parked right in front of a transmission lot. (most days we are off …. miles from any known roads, so at least it happened in a good place). We WERE going in to Yuma to have lunch with Kens cousin Morley and his wife Ruth. They very kindly came to pick us up while our jeep underwent “further testing”. After a wonderful lunch we came back to find out that all was good, as long as we had a spare 4900 dollars….. gulp… to spend on rebuilding the transmission….. and a week to hang around and wait for the “procedure” to be complete. SOOOOO. Morley and Ruth gave us a ride back to where our motorhome was parked. We got there and Ken realized that he had left the keys to the motorhome back in the jeep (at the transmission place in Yuma)
AND worse information, the only window that we left open was this tiny window above the sink
Ken felt quite certain he could fit through this opening (bear in mind it is only HALF of the shown window as half does not move) (I pointed this detail out to Ken, but he was STILL confident that he could get through the opening). So Morley backed his truck up to motorhome….
Now THIS is where medical knowledge comes in….in babies…. usually once the shoulders have been delivered all goes well…. and technically that may not be true for many of us……. but turns out it is true for Ken
Things look a bit iffy here…. but Ken was still quite confident.
SO the Shoulders have been delivered INTO the motorhome…….. and technically, I believe this is where I would get stuck… but not Ken…..
Now how many 69 year olds can you name who could pull this off….🤨🤨…. and slither down over the counter and onto the floor… YEA KEN
So we waited the week and got our Jeep back and headed north…. We have really enjoyed the wonderful places we have camped this year. I always am so impressed with the views, but rarely am I able to get pictures that reflect what I see. This year I DID get a few….. This is from Ogilby road, where we spent about 10 days this year.
…. and THIS ONE is another photo I got while a thunderstorm was passing. The desert is just SOOO BIG that you can get the whole half of the rainbow….
We shall see how soon we make it home and if there are any more adventures left in this trip.
Bye for now, much love Janet, Ken and the very bored Tucker dog….
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