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Caminho de Santiago starting day

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 This is my second time to walk the Portuguese Coastal Route of the Camino, though this time will be more complete, as last year I skipped a few days due to Barb's illness and our suddenly-required visa appointment.  A fine pilgrimage, led by Fr. Colin Jones, a very experienced pilgrim and longtime member of the Confraternity of St.James.  He leads loosely, in that he advertised and held several informational meetings beforehand, and sent us his list of locations and lodgings that he had reserved – thus marking the dates and stages that we would walk.  On the route, he usually led the way, particularly in uncertain locales or when he knew of shortcuts or alternate preferable paths – that is, one or two percent of the time we did not follow the officially-designated Camino route.  He knew generally of availability of coffee shops along the way, and preferred certain stops.  He was intent on photographing all the chapels, churches and wayside crosses along the way.


Our group of five:  Fr. Colin, Lisa and PJ Johnson (church members), me, and Karen Snow, a visitor from California.  Father Colin Jones is currently the official priest/chaplain of StJames.  Lisa and PJ are immigrants from Alabama–refugees from the US.  Karen was planning to visit Porto, found the church website and saw that we were planning a camino, so she asked to join!  We all got along well, all in the same age group, enjoyed our coffee breaks and then our glass of wine at the end of the day.  


We had our official pilgrim blessing at St.James Anglican Church on Sunday September 21st.  We started walking September 23rd with a bit of a shortcut, enabled by the metro.  The way within Porto is along busy urban roads, all rather ugly.  So we took the bus, and met at Matosinhos Mercado at 8:30 on Tuesday morning.  Our compatriots from last year, Shawn and Evette, joined us for this first day walk; and Barbara joined us for the first hour.  We all walked over the drawbridge at Matosinhos port, enjoyed a small breakfast at a coffee shop, to get our first stamp in our "Credencial” .  The rubber stamp is called a ‘carimbo’ in Portuguese; 'sello’ in Spanish.  Then to the beachside tourist office for our second carimbo; we walked up the beach, along corniche and boardwalk, to Vila do Conde, then inland to the metro, where we all returned home for the night (as we had done last year).  the first-day group


I collected some of our photos in a google-photo-album 2025CaminoDeSantiago.  For reference sake, here's a link to the previous year's 2024Camino album.  We took the same basic route both times.

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