Walking Across Italy

Today I decided to start our 13 mile journey from Tui to Porrino with a little surprise for my hiking buddies. Before leaving the USA, I purchased some Ninja Turtle costumes and surprised the guys this morning. (I’ve named our group the Old Age Mutant Ninja Turtles given our ages and obvious maturity.) Everyone was a good sport and donned their masks and posed for pictures in the hotel lobby. One hotel guest walked into the lobby and exclaimed that she wanted to “walk the caminho with those fun guys”!

The next surprise happened in the woods when we heard some badpipe music emanating from around the next bend. For a moment I thought I was transported to the hills of Scotland. But here in the Spanish forest, an entrepreneurial Spaniard had decided to serenade caminho hikers for a donation. It was so random, that you had to admire his hutzpah.

Feeling in the spirit, I joined in with a little jig. Stephen and Joe were not amused. They couldn’t run away fast enough.

The third surprise today was stumbling upon a beautiful garden cafe about an hour and a half outside of Tui. It wasn’t on any Google map, but we stopped for breakfast and discovered a lovely garden and pleasant servers. You could just tell that they enjoyed meeting and serving the pilgrims who ventured in from the woods.

There have been several other surprises today, like: (1) the town of Porrino is bigger and livelier than we expected; (2) the food in Porrino has been better than expected; and (3) the four of us could eat and drink for less than 80 Euros!

But the biggest surprise came after dinner tonight. We all spotted an ice cream freezer in the tapas restaurant and planned to indulge in a frozen, chocolate or vanilla treat after dinner. Unfortunately, after dinner, we discovered to our horror that the freezer was empty. Stephen quickly suggested that we find the nearest grocery store and see if they had any ice cream available. Good plan, but we realized that it was after 21:00 (9pm), so the probability was low that anything was open. As we strolled back to our hotel in defeat, Stephen spotted the grocery store with a sign that said it was open until 21:30.

I quickly glanced at my watch. It was 21:29.

You have never seen 3 old men run so fast to get in the automatic door! I don’t know what was more surprising, that the place was open or that we could run that fast. Luckily Magnum sells a 3-pack which we quickly purchased and savored all the back to the hotel.