The Portuguese Way

The encore

Some walks you do once. The Portuguese Way, the brothers decided, was not one of them. They had liked it so much in 2019 - the walk where three strangers became the Camino Brothers - that in May 2023 all three of them went back to Porto to do it again. This time with two twists: the Spiritual Variant on the way north, and no stopping at Santiago. This time, they would walk on to Finisterre. About 325 kilometres on foot in all.

The walk began with a surprise. Mike's daughter Sarah was staying near Lisbon - and without a word to her father, she took a bus to Porto and appeared the evening before the start. She spent the evening with the three of them, and in the morning she walked the first five kilometres of day one at their side. Then she turned around, walked back to Porto, and caught her bus back to Lisbon. A total surprise - and the best possible send-off.

There was another reunion waiting on the road: the same bar in São Pedro de Rates where Mike, Nicki and Dennis first met back in 2019, on that evening that started everything. They went back - and stayed so long reliving it that the day's walking ended in a way no pilgrim is supposed to admit to: a kind soul drove them the last ten kilometres to their destination. It would have been a hard walk, that one. Haha.

The Spiritual Variant took them up the River Ulla by boat, retracing the legendary route of the apostle's arrival in Galicia, before the road carried them into Santiago de Compostela. And then, while other pilgrims celebrated the end of their journey, the brothers kept walking west - all the way to Finisterre, the end of the world, where the land runs out.