March 7 – We woke up early this morning. We believed we have a game plan for going to Rubiães today. There were two options. One was to take a bus straight to Rubiães from Ponte De Lima. The other option is to take a bus to Labruja and then walk 8 to 9 kms to Rubiães. I was told by a couple of locals that both options would bypass the Beast. I opted for the second option as the Labuja bus would leave at 10am whereas the first option would leave at 1:30pm. We have been building our stamina and we felt walking under 10 kms today would be nothing.

This would also allow us to check out the medieval plus Roman bridge at Ponte De Lima before catching the Labruja bus at 10am.

After breakfast at the hostel, we walked to the bridge. The Roman bridge was built in the first Century and the Medieval in the fourteenth century. We were informed that they built the latter bridge because the river changed its flow and required a new bridge for the town to function. However they did not destroy the older bridge and just built an attaching new bridge to it. It just became a longer bridge.

Here are the photos:

Medieval Bridge Pics

Roman bridge is attached to Medieval Bridge. Here are the pics.

Two bridges as one. Before and while visiting the bridges we took photos of all other items of interest as much as possible.

After the picture photo op time, we returned to the hostel and took the bus to Labruja. The bus station was just behind the hostel so we thought this is a good sign that we have made a good choice. Furthermore, there was no rain for today. Another blessing indeed!

The bus tickets to Labruja only cost us €2.20 each. We arrived in Labruja at 10:40am. Once we exited the bus at our stop, we don our backpacks and took our poles. We followed the yellow arrows once again.

Here’s our starting point:

The walk started decent enough.

Then things started to change for us after a short period of time. We found we were not descending but ascending. The ascend was steep and at one point I handed Karen (who was ahead of me) my poles as I needed to use my bare hands to properly climb. I don’t have many pics of the ascend but Karen’s camera may have some. I will load these in next post.

Well folks you guessed it correctly. God has been with us all along and has an incredible funny sense of humour. We had inadvertently chosen the option that included having to climb the Beast without knowing it. LOL. My local source of information may have interpreted that I wanted to started my walk at the beginning of the climb instead of bypassing it.

It was tough and the blessing we had here is that it did not rain this day so the rocks on the ascend and descend were not too slippery.

Here’s the view from the top of the Beast:

We DID it. Yes it was very challenging on the incline but the real lesson here for me is that it was the fear itself that was the most frightening not the actual feat. A good lesson indeed. I shall remember this now for any future situations that I may perceive to be difficult. Thank you God for this humbling lesson! 😂 🙏😇😄😉.

The rest of the Way was super easy now. There was one somewhat difficult descend but we had our poles to help so all was well.

Here are the rest of pics until we reached Rubiães. Spring flowers, dogs, fellow pilgrims and farms. DOBs in pics here. Lol. Too lazy for another segment.

We reached Rubiães and stayed at Ninho hostel and once again cooked dinner for our pilgrim family for this night. Until my next post, keep well Calgary.