Camino Portuguese Day 3 Esposende to Vila do Castelo

Day 3 I woke up again at 5:30 AM, and I was an absolute wreck. The 17 mile hike the day before I was sure did me in. Today I was headed to Viana do Castelo. To get there was a series of old farming village towns and one of 3 eucalyptus forests. I never imagined I'd be doing that. As a matter of fact, I never imagined I'd be as tired the way I was that day. I could barely stand up, why you ask? Because my feet were killing me. I'm so sure I'm going to need to have some kind of bionic feet when I get back. Which as messed up as that sounds, I'd take full advantage of that and kick people in the shins. Like really hard, and if you're reading this, you know who you are! I'm sure I have a long list of potential "candidates". BUT not this day, I'm sure if the wind blew the wrong way I'd fall over and probably be scared by vultures.

It was on this day that we "picked up" someone we had met the day before. It was an American from Boston, named Amanda. We had previously met her a couple of hours into her hike from the day before. She was probably in her late 20's or early 30's and zipped past us that day.

Today we were dragging along and Amanda, came up from behind us yet again. Looked at us (Me actually) and her really unnecessarily cheering self said "Where are you all from"?! Immediately she's realized we had met before and from that point she opted to hang with us over the next 2 days. On this day, we did around 16 miles, which seemed less difficult than the day before. I'm pretty sure it was because I was already resigned to the fact I was going to end up passing out in the Eucalyptus forest from exhaustion and being eat by a Kola bear. NO! I didn't didn't see any kola bears, but there could have been though. JUST because I didn't see one, doesn't mean they are not there. It is mildly weird though on your body just sort of stops complaining about the amount of pain you're in. My feet are killing me, my blisters are about as fun as getting a pimple just before a "school pictures" Seriously the blister thing is not fun at all. OH and my Achilles is also killing me. No wonder that dude in Greek mythology died from getting hit there. I've started taping up my Achilles along side my toes. If I didn't think I'd break the Internet, I'd post a picture of my taped toes. 'Cause I'm sure you all want to see that!

Did I mention that it started to rain on this particular leg of our trip? We were just outside the city of Viana do Castelo, and we still had to cross the Lima River to get to Viana do Castelo. The only way to do that, was to cross the Viana do Castelo bridge. Also known as the Eiffel Bridge. Named after the same company that built the Eiffel Tower. The bridge is roughly 2,415 feet long, or 736 meters. We had been warned that if it's raining when we got to the bridge to take you into town, that we may want to wait till it was over before trying to cross it. Apparently the wind can get crazy and the wind starts to come at you from the side.

Well - you don't have to think to long to know what I did. So that bridge is barely wide enough for cars to travel on, the pedestrian walkway was an only about 3 feet wide.

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The rain started coming down hard, I didn't have my rain poncho on, because it didn't seem like the rain would amount to much. Yeah I got that one wrong. Cars thankfully were going by slowly thanks to the cyclist on the bridge. Which being on that bridge on a bike in normal circumstances was crazy, but they did while it was raining.

"AH HELL NO"!!!

Suffice to say I didn't die crossing the bridge just lots of rain, a bit of slip and slide action, but no disasters. Unless you count the blisters on my toes, and that my hair was a hot mess, but not like you could tell because I was wearing a ball cap. But you get the idea.

Our Camino "friend" Amanda was leaving to go to another hotel, but we all exchanged numbers and we would meet up in the morning and do it all over again.

A few minutes later and absolutely rained soaked we get to our hotel, The Hotel Laranjeira. Check in, get cleaned up and we were headed back out to go find food.

It didn't take long before we found a restaurant that was close by and open. We dipped in and much to our surprise it was the lunch lady from we had met the day before. She was staying in a nearby hotel. While it's not strange to keep seeing the same people on the Camino, to this point we hadn't run into anyone out at dinner, or at least not anyone we recognized. The Lunch Lady's name is "Hika" (HI-KA) pretty sure I have that spelling wrong. She was just about finished her meal when we came, but we asked her to sit with us. All but one person at our table was having wine, and when it came to doing a toast, our tea touting friend tried to toast with water. The next thing you know the owner comes running over saying say "Não, Não, please don't do that." Looking at the person with water. Apparently to toast with water is like really bad thing, and bad luck in thing to do in Portugal. The way the guy reacted you would have thought we were committing an international incident. Well I wasn't, my friend was. The owner poured just a little bit of wine for the "tea person" and we "retoasted" and the owner said "Obrigado" and walked away. The whole thing was hysterical to me. Not the toasting thing but the whole experience. When I was ordering, I asked for a beef meal, the owner said I will bring you something , "And you will like it" he said. I'm like cool, bring it on!

After dinner it was dessert and coffee time, again the owner just picked a dessert for me and I liked it.  Oh, and dinner he brought me steak. However in Portugal the steaks are thinner and a bit "tough" it was still very tasty but it's not like you're eating a Ruth Chris or some other "high-end" steak joint.

All in all it was a great experience, even the "toast incident" HA!

And of course we made plans with Hika to join us on our trek to Vila Praia de Âncora.

Until next time, stay outta trouble, and if you can't do that. Don't get caught.

Tim