Last night I went to the Country Dance at Loafer’s and talked with my friend who’ll soon be leaving on a cruise to Portugal and Spain. I’d gotten the information about that trip and it sent me in a different direction. I started thinking of the Camino and wondered if I could take a route from Portugal to Santiago. Once I discovered the Portuguese Coastal Camino on the website https://prayerfulpath.com, I never looked back. It felt like the right way for me to go to those countries and to realize a long-held dream of walking the Camino.

Since my return, people have asked me how hard it was to complete the path, did I have problems with my feet from walking so many miles. Now, looking back, I’d say the hardest thing was not the physical requirements but the mental stamina that was needed. The first two days were 8 miles each, which weren’t difficult. On that second day, I’d walked into the next city with the woman from Italy I’d met on the path. Her prior experience on the Camino, easy use of her phone and apps, and her extra pair of eyes watching for signs, made it easier. But the third day was quite a different story.

Day 3 was a 16-mile day and while that was challenging, the hardest part was getting lost and having to keep accessing directions using cafe wifi. Even with the route in hand, I got turned around in a neighborhood–like I sometimes do at home, where everything looked the same. Finally, a man who was taking a break from mowing his lawn (like the man painting the fence in an earlier post) came over when I called out to him. He looked at my map to my lodging in Fao and pointed me in the right direction. That night, I was so exhausted from the strain of getting lost, being by myself, that I remember falling to sleep and praying that I’d have a walking partner the next day. It would be another 16 miles and it would help to have someone beside me.

The next morning, refreshed and ready to go, I climbed the steps to a pedestrian bridge over the river. A young woman, maybe late twenties, with a wrap on her right knee, was ahead of me. When I caught up to her, we spoke and I slowed down to walk beside her.

“You go ahead,” she said. “I’m really slow.”

“That’s okay,” I responded. “I’m fine to go more slowly. After my day walking alone yesterday, it would be nice to have company.”

She told me her name was Franzi. She spoke great English and I was grateful. She was a lawyer from Berlin. We walked a steady pace on the path by the shore until it started to rain. We found a cafe and sat under the umbrellas, enjoying the ocean breeze and talking about our lives. Soon we got to the challenges of dating–and even at very different ages, we shared a lot of the same past experiences.

When the rain stopped, we continued on with frequent rest breaks. Franzi explained that it wasn’t her knee that was giving her trouble, rather blisters on her feet. While she was a runner and used to vigorous exercise, she felt the weight of the backpack pushing down on her feet in the boots had led to the problem.

We walked through the villages and she stopped as often as me to admire the flowers.

The hills of the forest and the cobblestone streets gave her the most difficulty. Finally, in the early afternoon, the heat beating down, we spotted a sign for a Pilgrim’s cafe and stopped for lunch. We were welcomed by the owner, David who wore a Vietnam Veteran shirt he’d been given by a pilgrim. In fact, the entire cafe was covered with pennants, flags, all kinds of gifts he’d been given from those walking the Camino. Not only did he bring us the soft drinks we ordered, but a plate of “biscuits” or cookies, orange marmalade, and peanuts. Later, he brought us a bottle of wine and two glasses and said, “Drink.”

As much as we were enjoying that oasis for tired and thirsty pilgrims, we knew we had lots of miles to cover to get to our destination of Viana do Castelo. We’d already planned that if we couldn’t make it by foot, we’d split the cost of an Uber.

The next part of the path went through a beautiful forest with tall eucalyptus trees, their aromatic fragrance mixing with pine and hardwoods. Some of the passages were steep and Franzi had great difficulty, complaining of pain, saying she wasn’t sure she could go on.

Finally, we came to a spot by a stream where there were places we could sit.

“I have to put my feet in that cold water,” Franzi told me. “My blisters are killing me.”

When I saw the huge blisters, I couldn’t believe she’d been able to walk all those miles. For the first time on all my solo journeys, I’d packed first aid supplies 🙂 I offered her large gauze pads and medical tape to cushion those blisters. She bandaged her feet and put on her hiking sandals. It helped enough for her to press on.

By the time we reached the next town, it was late, after five o’clock and we saw a bus pull away from a market. We asked the teenager at the checkout where the bus was headed; it was going to our destination.

“When’s the next bus?” Franzi asked him, and looked over his shoulder as he checked the schedule on his phone.

“It’ll be here in eight minutes,” he answered.

At the bus stop, Franzi told me, “I saw that it’s the last one for the day. Amazing!”

When the bus arrived, we gladly hopped on, the seat feeling like the waiting arms of a mother after her child’s been lost; how good it was to let the driver be in control of the rest of that day’s journey. Franzi and I marveled at all the miles we would have had to walk. Had we even covered eight of the sixteen miles?

“I feel bad that I kept you from walking,” she said.

“Don’t. You did me a favor,” I told her. “Not only did I have a walking partner keeping me from getting lost, I got to be a hero, a Good Samaritan on the Camino. I’m not sure I could have made it all 16 miles.”

We walked from the bus station to the central part of town. There we said goodbye as Franzi headed for the pharmacy and I walked on to my lodging. We exchanged numbers and I’d check later to see how the pharmacist, “like doctors” advised her about her blisters.

Looking back at the day, my prayer had been answered for a traveling companion, a person in my path to make the journey more fun and less confusing. I’d accepted the “lift” of a bus, a change in my plan from walking every step of those 158 miles; besides, as others have told me, I walked at least that many miles with all the times I got lost 🙂

And I arrived to Santiago with not a single blister.

Best to you,

Connie