Camino Portugués. Porto Airport to Mosteiró. 6 kms

For this elderly pilgrim from Porto,

It was further to go than he thought—o,

With an excess of will

He trudged up a hill,

And wished that he’d taken an auto.

The airport at Porto is north of the city, close to a point halfway along the first stage of the camino. So I walked five or six kms to join the camino at Mosteiró, where I’m staying at the Casa dos Caminhos. But it was tough going with no sleep the night before.

I picked up a Sim card at the airport for $35. It seemed a bit steep, but I got 10 gigs of data, and 1,000 local and 100 international minutes,  so perhaps it wasn’t such a bad deal.

Then I set off to find the hostel with my GPS. The latter was a bit confused at first, and tried to lead me onto the runway, but I dodged the planes and headed north along cobbled lanes, rows of houses on one side, and high stone walls on the other, protecting grape vines. And then intermittent fields of corn and the odd vegetable garden. It was more pleasant than it had looked from the air — a massive agglomeration of development with occasional green patches — and was definitely semi-rural. I remembered that as I had come in to land seven years ago, I had looked over the same area, stretching out to the sea, and decided to take the coastal route.

Speaking of which, I noticed that some of my route this afternoon was marked as the Portuguese Coastal Camino, but it wasn’t the path I had taken then. Why would you walk along the east side of the runway, when instead, you could trot down to the river from the cathedral, walk along the bank to the coast, and then tramp along the boardwalk by the sea?

And to quote another rhetorical question, I remember someone saying at breakfast, somewhere on the Camino years ago as we discussed where we had walked before, “How many caminos do you have to walk? You must be wondering the same thing. Well, this is the last one.  But then I said that ten years ago.

I have been seeing those metamorphic gum trees again, eucalyptus which begin with fat baby blue-green leaves that mature to quite different long green-brown ones.