Photo: Maria, Charlotta and Freida
I suspect my hardest and longest day of walking on the Camino will have occurred yesterday, day 6. The official route I had chosen is 28.4 km but in an attempt to get away from walking in the high winds near the beach, I chose an alternative route and added at least a couple kilometers. It was helpful that I met a lovely mother-daughter team from Germany, Maria and Charlotta, and their new Swedish friend, Freida, as we chatted our way forward, making the last 10 km’s of the day more fun.
Day 7 began with a 6 euro boat ride to Spain across the Minho River. They taxi 6 people at a time in the small motor boats used and I was placed with a 3 generation, 5 person family from Washington State. I had briefly talked with them the previous day and I ended up walking most of today with them, including stops for a “second breakfast” and lunch.
Edward is the 71 year old father of Collin. Collin and his wife Shannon, are both educators and have part of every summer off. He is a high school principal in a small town in NW Washington near the Canada border (Nooksack) and Shannon teaches PE at the local grade school. Their two boys are Oliver, age 14, and Isaiah, age 17. Edward left to do his first Camino (traditional route across Spain calked the Camino Frances) just over a year ago, in May of 2022. His best friend died from cancer a few months prior and Edward was experiencing depression. He decided to see if going on a Camino pilgrimage would help and it did! He met 13 (or 16?) people his first night out of St-Jean Pied-du-Port, France, and continued to walk with that group, off and on, the entire 900 kilometers Camino. Several of the group returned a year later to walk the Portuguese Central Camino route from Porto, and Edward turned around and brought his son and family here to walk the coastal route.
Over lunch Collin told the funniest (but true!) story about running with the bulls in Pamplona Spain in 2019. It sounded thrilling but extremely dangerous!
