It has been a very long time since my last entry here, and much has happened. To make a long story short, we set out from Barcelona, Spain on our bicycles and rode 800 km (500 miles) to Leon, Spain. Jane had a bad crash there and needed 20 stitches on her knee, and was advised not to ride the bike for a month. 

So, we took a train to Santiago de Compostela with the bicycles and stored them there, and then a bus to Lisbon, Portugal to walk that Camino back to Santiago.

Currently, we are a few days away from Santiago. The walk across Portugal is beautiful, and the people are extremely friendly and helpful, but the walk is tough. It is very lonely, there are not many other pilgrims walking the section from Lisbon to Porto, and a good portion of the walk is on busy roads with crazy drivers. However, from Porto on, it is a great walk and if one only has two or three weeks to do a long walk in Europe, it is to be recommended.

Jane is walking just fine, but riding a bike is still going to be a challenge. We have to assess what we’ll do when we reach Santiago. Since we have so many other countries we plan to visit, we may just take the bikes by train to catch a ferry boat and head to either Normandy, France, or the U.K. We’re not certain yet.

It was challenging to operate the radio while walking Portugal. We were just too tired and spent at night. Finally, yesterday, during our last day in Portugal, we stopped in a farmer’s field, put down the sleeping mats, threw up an antenna and got on the air. 

I talked with three stations: Roy, G4DMC, the U.K., Sig, DL1HSI, Germany and Yoan, LZ1YW in Bulgaria. All were great operators and I enjoyed my Morse code chats with them. My little radio, the ATS-3A and the QRPme.com Tunah Tuner are real performers.

Once we decide on our next phase of the journey, I will post something here. Hopefully, in the next few days I will have more time to operate the radio from Spain as well.

Thanks for following.