Day 11 Mealhada to Agueda 25km

At this stage we are moving along each day with the same group of people, ie. We see them on the road and chat with them at the hostels. They are a Belgian father and son, a guy from Derry, a couple from Canada, a guy from Greystones, and a couple of Frenchmen. In the first few days we had regular contact with an Australian woman, an Italian woman and a Bulgarian man - all of these appeared to have dropped out or dropped back. Also, two French ladies haven't been sighted by us for two days. We plan to take a day off when we get to Porto and so may see some of them again after that.

On the trail.

I wouldn't call any of these days boring but today was ordinary. There were no interesting agricultural activities, no spectacular views, and nothing quirky or strange. We were away by 7.15am and in Agueda by 2pm.  We are staying in Residencial Celeste (also seems to go under the name Albergue Antonio) and it is fine, if a little pricier than other lodgings to date. The room is fine but the bathroom is tiny. There is a good kitchen and so we will cook in for the first time this trip and we have invited a couple of our fellow walkers to join us.

Scented rose.

On the Camino Frances there is accommodation in the smallest of interim towns on each of the stages, so you can tailor stage lengths to suit yourself and your capabilities. On this camino, any accommodation tends to be centred in the nominated stage ending towns, so tailoring the length is much more difficult. The stage lengths for the next three days are 16, 29 and 34. Ideally these three days would be better managed at about 26km each. However, there appears to be little interim accommodation to facilitate this. We will think a little bit more about it.