We’ve arrived in Albergue Constantina – where we stayed in 2019. Then we shared a bathroom with Tom, today, luckily we have a room with a private bathroom and a small balcony. I emphasise luckily because we had booked to stay at Hotel Quinta dos Leiries some 400m further on. Unfortunately when we arrived, tired and hungry no one was at home and the message on the door informed us that the neighbour had the key. She however had gone out, leaving us somewhat lost. We messaged the owner but after 20 minutes waiting for a reply gave up and trudged here. Only to find that the albergue was full 😢. But the young lady made some calls and conjured up a room 😊. We are indeed lucky.

Back to last night’s hotel. Not a nice experience. Dorothy hates finding a rubber sheet on the bed and the mattress was pre-war so not ideal. To keep warm we went to sleep around eight and slept very fitfully until 7 when

we left to try to find some breakfast

After a quick coffee and croissant we poodled off to Ponte de Lima, a lovely town beside the river. En route we came across this lady washing her clothes in the river. A somewhat sad scene.

We stopped for breakfast in Ponte de Lima, picked up some sunscreen in anticipation of the roasting to come and failed in our attempt to find a lightning connector to replace our defunct version.

We took such a long time over these somewhat mundane tasks that we were forced to stop for coffee on the other side of the old bridge.

The route wound its way along the bank of the river before ascending slowly.

The path meandered through the forest staying within sight of the river for quite some time. As it climbed the river passed through a number of impressive waterfalls.

On our previous wanderings along the Portuguese we stopped at a lovely small cafe/simple restaurant alongside a fish farm where perhaps another dozen or so had also stopped.

Today unfortunately was quite a different story with only us and a sad, somewhat dilapidated middle aged chap serving. The sandwich was great as was the sparkling water but the difference with last time was quite overwhelming.

After an hour or so we pressed on. We saw no other walkers on this section which as I remembered somewhat belatedly, climbed steeply for the last km or so.

We arrived at the top, the highest point on the Portuguese before descending gently towards San Roque.

We were tired and looking forward to a shower and food only to be greeted by the notice on the door 😞.

Still, all’s well that ends well. Albergue Constantina took care of us, ferried us to their restaurant in the same manner as last time, fed us fish and chips and took us back.

It’s been a lovely few days but I think that we need to get home. Short stints on a Camino are the way to go I suspect. It’s a pain to get back and forth but once in Spain or Portugal, the weather is great, the walking is lovely, the infrastructure is in place and it’s relatively inexpensive. We’ll walk to Valenca tomorrow, grab a bus to Santiago, stay the night in hotel Compostela and catch a flight home in the morning. Sounds like a plan.

Buen camino