Last post on Caminho Portugues

We’ve been home for a few weeks now and glad to enjoy its familiar comforts. Not all is comfortable:  our favorite Vietnamese restaurant/home away from home, Nam-Viet, closed its Cleveland Park location while we were away. And Ed has visited multiple doctors and will undergo outpatient surgery to remove benign lipomas from his back.  We are relieved, at least, to have a likely resolution of the pain and discomfort that shadowed the entire caminho for him.

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“Santiago” — Saint James (the apostle), whose body is conveyed from Jerusalem to Galicia and eventually interred, it is believed, in the Cathedral de Santiago de Campostela. This depiction found at Ponte de Lima, Portugal.

So in this final blog post, we salute all you faithful reader- friends and share a few more favorite photos as we continue to turn over in our hearts and minds all that we experienced, learned, shared and enjoyed — new friends and old, deepening and maturing relationships, centuries of human activity (beautiful and reprehensible) crystalized in stone and glass, vegetables cultivated by women bent over short-handled hoes, fruits of the sea pulled out of the brine only hours ago, and so much more…

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Outside Santarem, Portugal, Mama (in cap) pulled us into the bar for a much-needed cool drink. Ed conversed in Portuguese with Mama and Papa and learned about their son’s survival of being gored (see photo above Papa’s head).
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Baiona, Spain, a romantic castle above the Ria Vigo, one of four Rias (fjords) marrying the Atlantic Ocean with the rugged beauty of Galicia.

 

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