After staying outside of Esposende last night, we walked through Esposende this morning after breakfast near the albergue. We were led through the main area of the town. It looks quite established and I am sure we would have better dinner options than last night. The town is more alive than the seaside areas that we walked through over the last few days. People are already setting up their businesses at 8 am. It may be that the tourist season has not quite started.
We swung over to the coast but that was the last time we saw the ocean for the day, or maybe for a while. There was a report on Facebook of an attack by a pack of dogs on a female pilgrim in the area that we are going tomorrow. We are changing plans to avoid that area.
Back to today, we soon got inland and for the first time on Camino Portugese, we have terrain. It feels a bit more like Camino Frances and yet it feels different at the same time. The towns all seem to be running into each other whereas on Frances, the towns are isolated and we often walked past open field to the next town. Expectations are funny things. Getting close to a town after walking in the open field, you know there is going to be coffee shops for breaks. Here, you don't know when and where the next coffee break is going to be. It feels like there is hardly any.
Today was supposed to be a short day, distance-wise, but with the hilly terrain, it turned out to be a long day. It is particularly hard since we have forgotten that there could be terrain after 3 days of absolute flat. I also believed it when Google said that it is essentially flat. Come to think of it, the Google route may actually be flat but we didn't walk it, we followed the Camino arrows.
The albergue is quite nice albeit a fair distance off the main route. The 2-euro vegetable soup by grandma is excellent, hence the popularity. We ended up at a bar close-by for dinner. It wasn't pilgrim menu but we ended up 10-euro each with huge portions of foods and beers. Who needs pilgrim menu when you can have that.
Things here in Portugal are cheaper than in Canada, at least for stuff we had experienced this time such as groceries, meals and public transportation. For example, by booking early for the promo fare, the 3-hour train ride from Lisbon to Porto costs 14 euros. I vaguely remember European gas prices are way expensive but right now, gas prices in this area are the same as Ontario. (Correction: the numbers are the same but here it is in Euros, not Canadian dollars, so the gas prices are about 50% more expensive in Portugal)
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