Portugal
Spain
How the Camino Brothers began
It started, as many good things do, over food and wine. After the second day of hiking the Portuguese Way, Mike from Canada found himself at Macedo's Bar in São Pedro de Rates - and at a nearby table, Nicki and Dennis, two brothers from Germany. The menu that night, as Nicki later recorded it for posterity: "Spaghetti and Wine and Beer - we became friends immediately and the journey began." One shared table led to a long evening, and by the end of the night the three had a plan: meet the next morning and walk the day together.
And so they did - all the way. About 275 kilometres north from Porto, out of Portugal and into Spain, two weeks of walking that ended in Santiago de Compostela on October 11, 2019. Three men who had been strangers a fortnight earlier arrived as something else entirely.
That night, back in his own country, Nicki sent the message that sums up every camino's last day: "My thoughts are very confusing and have not landed yet." The same message signed off with a joke that became a running gag for all three of them - "make sure the fins stay wet... Brook Trout."
They've been walking together every day since.