The trip is coming quickly. We fly from Edmonton to Toronto to Amsterdam to Lisbon beginning Wednesday and arriving Thursday. A day in the hotel and we get on our bikes Friday morning. This trip appears to be less strenuous than the spring's Historic Heartland - even though we pass through some of the same territory. We avoid the most rugged of Portugal's terrain. Leaving Lisbon we follow the river north towards Tomar, Porto, Vigo and ultimately, Santiago Spain. We'll arrive there October 10th - Thanksgiving Monday. We're hoping to connect with Jeff Rock in Lisbon - he's walking the Camino, although I'm not exactly sure of his itinerary on the route. Might even see him in Santiago and along the way...who knows what God has in store.
Planning this trip has gone surprisingly well. Our flights came at a major discount way back in the spring. We'd been considering this trip in lieu of Historic Heartland which we didn't think we'd be able to do this year. Historic Heartland came up and worked into our schedule. Since we were going through Toronto, anyway, we'd stop and visit my aunt, uncle, and Jeff Rock. Jeff told us of his sabbatical plans to do the Portuguese Camino...one thing led to another...flights were booked...route and timing seemed good. We gave over the planning of accommodation to Camino Ways - we had good experiences on the French Camino in 2018. The journey began.
In the meantime, Toronto Pearson problems got worst, and then better. We were there just last month flying to Quebec and the Gaspe trip. For that we packed everything as carry on. A small suitcase, a backpack and there was no significant danger of losing luggage. This trip won't be quite so light. The suitcase will be larger...the suitcase will be checked - hopefully arriving in Lisbon on the same plane, and at the same time, we do.
Our flights - Edmonton to Toronto to Amsterdam to Lisbon. Hopefully, as I said, all will go smoothly. We arrive in Lisbon at about noon local time - sometime around 4 am Edmonton time. Full of jetlag we'll spend some time catching our breath. Plans are to meet Jeff for dinner on Thursday night. Then, after a decent night's sleep we get on the road. Our first day is light. Following the Tejo river to Villa Franca de Xira. It's about 45 kilometers. Mostly flat - a couple of hours of riding. We'll cover about 600 kilometers between Lisbon and Santiago. It looks like the weather will be in the high teens, low twenties most of the time. October in northern Spain begins to cool - although freezing temperatures are highly unlikely; cooler days and nights are a distinct possibility.
I'm particularly looking forward to a couple of days at the end of our first week. By then we'll be in Coimbra where there's a large university. We stopped in Coimbra in early May while on the Historic Heartland trip but didn't have time to explore. The students were out in force, though, celebrating the end of classes; graduations and moving forward. Near Coimbra in Condeixa-a-Nova are some Roman ruins which were, sadly, closed to the public in May. We'll be there with lots of time to explore this time around - pictures will be taken.
Cycling the Camino brings with it particular challenges. We've found that sticking to the Camino trail doesn't work well when on bikes. There are places where the hiking trail can be difficult to traverse with a loaded bicycle. On the French route we abandoned the trail on our second day and travelled, instead, by road. The roads will well marked with the stylized scallop shell Camino signs. Often following the freeway the traffic was light, drivers used to and alert to cyclists. I'm not so certain about the routes we'll follow in Portugal. Some of the roads will be busier - especially nearer the large cities - Lisbon, Porto, Vigo. In April and May our paths crossed with several pilgrims walking to Santiago. In Tomar, an American woman, expressed some displeasure at finding herself walking "busy roadways." The information is available, for a price, online. I'm avoiding paying that price preferring the mystery of the journey, and the discoveries to be made along the way.
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