Day One/Two THE JOYS OF TRAVELING

 Suzanne, Cheryl and I started this great aventure at 4:30 pm with a ride from our dear friend Pam to Dulles airport.  All went VERY well. And we were feeling confident.  That was our first mistake.  Then we got a message from the OTHER Cheryl who we will call CA from now on.  Her flight from Newark and then on to Porto had been missed and she was on her way to Munich and a TWELVE hour layover.  These are the joys of travel.

We made it to Madrid, but just late enough to miss our flight to Porto.  I give kudos to Iberia Airlines, however, because they had us booked on a flight three hours later before we had even landed.   American airlines you can learn a lesson from this.  What a great experience.

After four hours in Madrid, we were on our way to Porto and arrived 24 hours after we had begun this journey including the drive to Dulles.

Porto is such a beautiful city.  I could easily live here.

 

Then we learned that CA (the second Cheryl) had spent TWELVE HOURS in the Munich airport! She arrived at midnight and we welcomed her at breakfast.  On day 3, we left our hotel, walked to the Porto cathedral and then on to our walk to Pavoa de Varmin. Most of the way was boardwalks with quite a few other pilgrims. It was hot but not uncomfortable, but I did make the mistake of changing the inner soles in my Hoyas and that made my walking very different than what I had done in training. I’ll fix that tomorrow.

 We’ve already met people from Switzerland, New York and Philadelphia, and we walked 12.4 miles and nearly 30,000 steps not including the 2 miles we walked in Porto. I am sunburned on my shoulders, two toes are starting to have blisters (I think from the new insoles being too tight) but otherwise great.  Slept for two hours, showered and went out for drinks and dinner.  So we are approximately 13 miles into out trek ad doing fine.

Nice folks, but didn’t really talk much.

 

These were the markers for the trail.  Some were as noticeable as this one and others were merely yellow arrows on a telephone pole.  The easiest was to just follow the pilgrims who were in front of us though!

The toughest part of the walk were the sand dunes that overtook the boardwalk.  We were so happy that most of the trail next to the Atlantic Ocean was covered by a boardwalk.