March 3 – our second day on the way of St.James. We began this stage at Vila do Conde and our plan was to reach Sao Pedro De Rates. Hopefully you will enjoy my telling of our adventure.

We began once again with breakfast but this time we had it at a Portuguese Panaderia that served coffee and sell bread to the locals.

I enjoyed my first sip of actual Portuguese coffee outside a hostel or guest house. Karen is an avid tea drinker but made the exception today and tasted coffee with me. She liked it.

Picture of Panderia below. By the way, they call breads Pao here. Sounds like Chinese but it means bread to the Portuguese.

Right after breakfast, off we went on our path feeling fresh and excited. Karen and I took some pictures of what we saw on this stage of our Camino.

The views were nice and we walked with two of the perigrinas from last night for a very short part in the beginning.

The two ladies are younger and soon they were off on their brisk ways while we took our own sweet time.

The following pictures shows the towns’ signs on our way to Sao Pedro De Rates.

Karen enjoyed her second Pastel De Nata on this stage. She has 10 more to go to catch up to me.

At lunchtime we found a nice picnic spot in a tiny park dedicated to a doctor who serviced the community in the area for 50 years. Lunch was a mish mosh of yesterday’s dinner leftovers and fruit.

It wasn’t all rosy today. There were moments of danger on this walk. We actually had to share the road with fast drivers. There wasn’t any side curb to walk on. Cars zip by in inches from us. We had to be watchful to ensure we did not get hit by passing cars. Here is one picture of the type of road we walked on today. See what I mean.

We made it to Sao Pedro De Rates by 2:45pm.

DOB for today consists of a mean (he barked at me angrily and I felt he would have jumped onto me if it weren’t for the high wall) blond retriever and a tiny cute toy mongrel. I don’t know what kind of dog it is. Here is the strange part. I thought the people it was with were the owners. They said he was a stray who followed them and they don’t know why.

The Albergue at Sao Pedro De Rates has the coolest stamps that I have seen thus far.

Once again we cooked at this Albergue and the pilgrims have identified Karen as the chef in this two woman team. LOL. We had bean soup and pan fried wonder bread. The following picture is our peregrine family for dinner as they enjoyed Karen’s cooking.

Good night Calgary. I hope everyone is safe as Karen had updated me of the heavy snow fall you have been experiencing. We don’t have snow here but we have our own challenges with rain. Be well!