Camino Pilgrimage 2019

The silence in the Monastery was conducive to a very good night of rest. It helped that doors closed at 9:15pm last night. You’re either in or out. The nuns kindly prepared breakfast for us.  I’ll never forget our stay at the Armenteira Monastery. Today I walked in loving memory of my Aunt Trienie Combrink, Born 15 February 1947, passed away 07 June 2019. I left a stone at the Armenteira Monastery wrapped in a South African flag in her memory. On the Camino if you pick up a stone, you put your sorrow into it, when you place the stone you leave some of your sorrow behind. I placed the stone and what happened after that was the most incredible experience I’ve ever had on any of my Camino’s. We started walking at 7:30am, after 300 metres we entered Ruta de la piedra y del agua (Route of Stone and Water) It was the most amazing forest I’ve ever had the privilege of walking through. It gave me time to reflect on life and just commune with nature. We were fortunate having a...

It was yet another early morning on the Camino. We prefer it when it’s much cooler. The rest of Spain is having a heatwave and we’ve been very lucky with temperatures of 25deg and below. Today we moved onto Variante Espiritual and added on km’s to our Camino. It’s a much quieter section of the Camino Portuguese. There were a lot more elevations in comparison to the normal central route, not that it’s a problem for us.  We walked quite fast in the beginning as we wanted to explore the small town of Combarro. It seemed rather touristy to me but still worth the visit. The walk from Combarro to Armenteira is about 9.3km’s without any services between the two towns as it goes over the mountain. We had stock of water as we knew we would need it.   The views were not great as it was a foggy day. We were not complaining as it was much cooler than yesterday. We arrived at the Armenteira Monastery at 1:45pm, 15 mins late for check in. We had to wait until siesta was over a...