We first visited Santiago de Compestella in November 2017, for a holiday to visit Emma, who was currently living there.  It was during this visit that we learnt more about the Camino, and Richard in his wisdom decided that he would like to walk it, and Theresa as usual was always up the the challenge.

It was then about deciding which one we would like to do.

After a lot of reading and research we decided on the Portuguese Way, as it did not appear to be as busy as some of the other Ways and that Emma could drop us off where we would start from.

We decided that we did not want to walk as “traditional pilgrims” as we like our creature comforts, not wanting to sleep in dormitories, preferring our own space and bathroom!  Also carrying all our luggage was also ruled out, not because we could not carry it, but preferring to carry what we needed and having the rest transferred along the way.

We ended up choosing to walk the Portuguese Way booking through a “company” who would book our accommodation and arrange for our luggage between stages.

The next steps for us was to start training and get used to walking further than we had done for either a long time or ever!

Our training was starting with short walks and gradually working up to 20km walks.  We did this by ourselves and with dogs as well.  As the terrain in Tenerife is nothing like what we would have on the “camino” we were probably doing more than we needed to, also most, if not all, of our walks were never flat!

Portuguese Way

May came around before we knew it and we were off again to Santiago, we had a few days rest before Emma took us down to Tui for the start.  This is a video compilation of our Camino!