Camino Part 2

It seems inevitable.  Walking the Camino de Santiago gets in your blood, and sooner or later it calls you back.  In 2013, we walked the Camino Francés route--the most popular of the many marked and recognized pilgrimage routes in Spain and literally throughout Europe that lead to Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain.  If you followed this blog on that journey, you'll remember our experiences as we trudged the nearly 500 miles from St Jean Pied de Port, on the French side of the Pyrenees Mountains, across northern Spain over the course of six weeks.  You can still read about that journey by clicking on 2013 in the blog archive timeline at the right side of this page.

This time, we'll be walking south-to-north along the Camino Portugués route from the city of Porto on the Portuguese coast, across the Spanish border, and on to Santiago.  It's a shorter route--roughly 160 miles--which we hope to complete in two weeks.  Before we begin the actual walking portion of our journey, we'll spend a couple of days at the Catholic shrine of Fatima, paying our respects to the mother of Jesus who appeared there in 1917 to three children.  We'll also spend a couple of days sightseeing in Porto.

When we reach Santiago, we'll have a chance to meet the gentleman known to pilgrims as Johnny Walker (not the popular beverage), the Camino angel who recovered our stolen backpacks at the end of our 2013 Camino, and thank him in person for his role in this minor miracle.  From Santiago we'll bus back approximately 250 miles back down the Camino Francés to the town of Carrión de los Condes.  Because of scheduling constraints, we skipped the 60 miles from that city to León in 2013, so we'll take five days to walk that segment of roads and trails across the Spanish meseta, thereby officially completing the full 500 miles of our Camino Francés.

Because we'll have no need to return to Santiago again, we'll be taking a train directly from León to Lisbon, where we'll spend the next few days playing tourist before flying home on June 1.  Stay tuned as we post a few words and pictures from Chapter 2 of Jim and Jeanette's Camino story.

Test post for mobile app

This is a test post for a mobile app I'm trying for use on our Camino Portugues. The sample photo has nothing to do with this journey.