Day 6 – To Vila Nova Barquina

After our excellent evening meal  with Helena and Honora, our young Italian lady we had a good night’s sleep in our luxury abode. They joined us again for breakfast before we set out.

It is a shame that they are, off the main Camino route and also not near the end of one of the main stages. Many people doggedly follow the “stages” described in the main guide book although these are normally around 30+ km per day. That is just too far for a lot of people, but they follow the book, finding it very hard and get disheartened. We work on a daily distance of about 20 km a day, where we can, and manage with that. Occasionally, like yesterday, we just have to walk more than 20km, but we try not to.

The first stage of our walk today was, we were warned, on a very busy road with absolutely no pavement areas at the side. Neither of these statements turned out to be completely true. At times several vehicles were in our vicinity and some times there was no where to walk other than the road surface, but, as far as we can remember we never got both together. It wasn’t a great walking place but OK. The weather was very pleasant, so things were fine. Initially it was rather misty, but the sun soon cleared that and the rest of the walking was good.

This is horse, and Stork, country and we saw plenty of evidence of both. In one place we passed a line of power pylons, each adorned with several Stork nests.

We soon seemed to be in Golega, the next largish town where we found a cafe in the pleasant centre.

Barbara was feeling a little lacking in get-up-and-go this morning so tried a drink of hot chocolate, which worked its magic, she felt much more energetic after that.

The yellow Camino marker arrow signs were rather scarce asd unclear today, possibly because up to yesterday the Camino track and and the pilgrimage route to Fatima followed the same route. At Santarem the two tracks separated and, we feel, the Camino route becomes the poor relation, getting less attention. Nevertheless we managed OK with the arrows that were there, two guide books and a gps track on my phone. As before there seem to have been several changes in the route fairly recently as sometimes we had the choice of several possibilities depending on which guide you liked at. We stopped at Sao Caetano and had a small coffee in a tiny Archeological museum staffed by 3 young women. No sign of any visitors others than us. Shortly afterwards we passed through a strange “Ghost Town” sort of place, Quinta Cardiga. This had been a very large palace with all its supporting buildings, stables, farm buildings, church etc. All remarkably intact but completely deserted.

We did read that there had been some sort of plan to renovate the main palsce buildings to make a Posada, the Portuguese equivalent of the Spanish Paradores. It could well work as its location is excellent very close to the Tajo river, and with excellent view s etc. I hope it works out.

Very soon afterwards we left the Camino route to get to our stopping place for tonight. As we’ve found on this Camino finding a suitable place to stay can take some imagination and accepting the fact that the only place is not actually quite on the Camino route. This is the case today, as, yesterday, out lodgings are about 1 km off the main Camino route.  The place we are staying in is a motel, on a garage/ petrol station site. Adequate, but un-pretentious.  It has what looks like a good restaurant, but as it’s Monday, it is closed this evening. So we wandered down the road and had a delicious meal at another restaurant.