We departed Santiago and Spain on Tuesday and arrived in Lisbon.  We have spent the last 3 days unwinding from our Camino experience at the seaside town of Cascais.  Great scenery, great weather, great seafood…no hiking boots.

Although we took the last couple days off…we returned to “strolling” (somewhere between “sauntering” and “gamboling”) today for about 20 kilometers.  We toured around the beaches and cliffs here on the westernmost, “closest to the US” piece of Europe.   We were surprised to come across a Camino de Santiago (“Caminho de Santiago” in Portuguese) sign for a route that originates in Lisbon.  Made us start a conversation about walking one of the other Camino routes…possibly the Camino Portugues in the future.

After 30 days on the Camino, I was finally saying “gracias” and “sí” instead of “arigatou” and “hai” (reflex response from 7 years of living in Japan).  Now that we are in Portugal, I am struggling with dropping the gracías and replacing with “obrigado”…which ironically sounds very similar to “arigatou”.  (Although widely believed, “arigatou” was not derived or imported from the Portuguese “obrigado”.)  Luckily, we return to New York City on Sunday…where saying thank you is optional.

I reviewed my Garmin app from the Camino and the daily average steps was over 30,000 steps for 32 days.  Makes sense that our 800,000 meter trek would take us just over 1 million steps.  Sarah contends that she took 150,000 more steps than me due to her shorter strides (and her unhealthy desire to find ways to try and beat me in all categories).

So please add this quote to your inspirational poster or coffee mug collection…(with attribution to me)…“A journey of a million steps…takes a million damn steps”.