The Same Cathedral, a Different Person Arriving
On the last morning, I got a flat tire outside Padrón and had to lean on our guide to fix it. The Camino was trying to test me one last time! Not long after, I rode the final stretch into the square in Santiago, and heard bagpipes start up right as the cathedral came into view.
It hit the exact same nerve it did in 2012 — that specific, disorienting joy of finishing something you privately doubted you could finish. Standing in that square again, thirteen years and one entirely different mode of transportation later, I thought about the version of myself who finished walking the Camino back then and never, not once, imagined she’d be standing in this exact spot again. AND – if you’d told her she’d be back on a bicycle — a sport she had zero interest in at the time — she would have laughed you straight out of the square in Santiago!
I couldn’t have predicted this trip. I also couldn’t have predicted, back in 2006, that walking away from a stable corporate job with no real plan would set off the entire chain of decisions that eventually led me here, twice, by two completely different methods.
My first Camino handed me a mantra that’s steered every decision since: “Make Your Own Way”. I didn’t build this life by doing what everyone else was doing, and going back to a place I love, this time by a completely different route, felt like the truest version of that mantra I’ve lived out yet. I never know what’s next, and I’ve stopped expecting to.
None of this would have been possible without a company willing to build a route this thoughtfully. ExperiencePlus! designed this Camino Português itinerary specifically to feel personal rather than packaged — hand-drawn chalk arrows instead of a rigid group pace, guides who know this stretch of Portugal like it’s their own backyard (because it is!), enough structure to keep you safe and enough freedom to still feel like your own journey.
It’s the kind of company that makes it possible to do something genuinely new inside something you’ve technically done before. (I wrote up the full trip details, route, and practical logistics for their blog, if you’re weighing whether to book it yourself.)
