Such a mixed bag. Not the people but the hotels, the restaurants, even the landscape and the weather. The first night we were in a grand hotel down on the waterfront, with its pool table in the lobby and a spa, where our lovely rooms overlooked ... the bins, with all the cacophony of garbage pick up, staff on their smoke break, and then more rubbish. Last night the room was tiny, the pillows rounded chunks of foam and the bathroom functional (because it included a bidet) but the bathtub was divine, the lighting good and even with a driving rain through my (open) French door through much of the night, I slept a charm.

I had to mop the floor in the morning and wring out the one sock that had fallen into the puddle, but it was joyous.

Sometimes it's the meal that can make the moment, such as my first evening in Porto, when five of us dined together at "Raiz", a lovely restaurant where we had a prime table, engaged waiters, and we shared the unusual dishes that came out. The wine was delicious. It came from Cartuxa, a winery that I'd visited on my "couples cycling trip" in 2017, and somehow it felt as though I was raising a glass to the end of that period of my life. I may need more rituals like that.

Decision-making, though, is the bane of our existence here, as we finish day three of El Camino. Particularly about dinner. When I did four days of the Costa Rican Camino in February, we were just served a plate of food at the end of the day, usually in the home of a local woman. Effortless. One gets tired of making decisions in life, so that was a real treat. Here, there are six women, all used to deciding everything, all the time. None of us wants to make decisions but we know it needs doing.

A large bus pulled up to our wedding-venue type hotel, overlooking the crashing surf of the Spanish coastline (we entered Spain yesterday, so our Portuguese Camino only had two days in Portugal), as I was working on this post. The restaurant includes four very long tables set for dinner, so I can only assume more buses are expected. I'm happy we dined at a local tapas place nearby.

That dinner, which I just returned from, was divine. A small restaurant where we sat at an excellent, round table with the sunset view out a plate glass window. We ate pimientos de padrón, as one should in Spain, and mussels, and a squid-ink pasta that "es como calamar pero no es". I can only assume cuttlefish but can't find the word in Spanish. We had such wide-ranging conversations and laughed so hard that I think (I hope) we shocked the youngish man sitting by himself eating steak frites with a beer. Perhaps he was listening and learning that older women talk about everything from politics to vibrators to books and erotica. Often in the space of ten minutes.

The details, however, remain with us. What happens on the Camino, stays on the Camino.