Camino Pilgrim

The craziest thing happened today. I am spending the night inside a fire station. Yup, true story. I will get to that later.

I woke up in the morning at 7am so I could be sure to reach my favorite breakfast cafe, Nova Pombalina, for food on the go. I had also packed around 1,5L water to survive most of my hike today.

I saw my first pilgrim already at the hostel this morning, the second one I passed near Losbon Cathedral (official starting point) and the third pilgrim I shared the road with for the whole day.

He is an older guy from Israel and works as a lawyer for a private company. He plans to walk an average of 50km a day on the Camino!!! Not to mention that he used to be a field medic in the army. You can see him in the picture with the longest bridge in Europe in the background.

I really enjoyed our talks today and I learnt a lot. Really made me motivated to push my limits this Camino. Maybe I will see him on one of his rest days, but its unlikely, since he will walk so much further than me six days a week.

Chatting with the Israeli guy (we never even exchanged names) made the hike go by fast. In the first four hours we had over 22km covered. Lisbon went by almost like blinking. Afterwards, we just had narrow sandy trails going through valleys until I reached my final destination.

I knew when coming to this trip that my physical preparation this time was far from perfect. After twenty kilometers, I started to feel how one of my toes was getting close to being blistered (thankfully it didn’t). I have to use sun screen at least twice a day while hiking because of the pale skin. My sports equipment is causing my skin to rash in several places and that is making life quite uncomfortable.

These are all minor issues, because I walked with caution and held myself back from pushing further.

This made my trip end in a small city where the only place for pilgrims to stay is a fire station (“bombeiros” in Portuguese). I was used to the idea of Spain that pilgrim houses that work purely on donations are like old churches, but this country is really different…

I enjoy my stay in the fire station a lot. I have a supermarket nearby to prepare meals for breakfast and lunch tomorrow. The facilities are all really nice. Didn’t find a sliding pole though, so that’s a bummer. The people here are super nice even though they speak only Portuguese and Spanish and I speak neither.

Overall, I am spending all of my evening watching the Game of Thrones finale and recovering my body for tomorrow. It will be a long day ahead if all goes according to plan. Fingers crossed.