Just Follow the Yellow Arrow
After yesterday's battering, Day 4 felt like the Camino offering a quiet apology.
The hills were still there — up, up, and more up, the kind of climbing that makes your calves burn and your mind go blank in the best possible way. But the brutal terrain of Day 3 had eased off, and somewhere in that mercy the knee held, the blisters held, and something that felt almost like rhythm started to emerge. The coast of Portugal is simply beautiful. I don't have a more sophisticated way to say it. There were stretches of beach path where the ocean filled your entire field of vision and your thoughts just... dissolved. No negotiating with the mind, no mental noise — just sand, salt air, and the next yellow arrow. Follow the arrow. That's the whole job. There's something quietly radical about reducing life to that for a few hours.
New faces joined the road too — a wonderful new friend from Australia, Emily, and a welcome reunion with the one from Denmark, Torben, I'd met earlier on the trail. The Camino has a way of doing that, pulling people back into your orbit just when you'd assumed the road had taken them elsewhere.
Seven hours of walking in total. Somewhere in the middle of it, at 1pm sharp, I stopped for lunch and called my girls — as I do every single day at that hour. It's become the fixed point of the journey. They appear on the screen and everything recalibrates. They have no idea how much of this walk they're carrying with me. That daily call is the real fuel — more than the food, more than the wine, more than the yellow arrows.
Speaking of food — Caminha. Caminha. The best meal of the trip so far, by a distance. I am not walking the Camino. I am walking to eat, and the Camino is the very scenic route between meals.
Day 4: gentler, greener, and full of grace. Still going. ✌️
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