Portugal is on fire, but I am fine

We are walking through hills today, heading to São João de Madeira. We start at 7:30 after a quick coffee and ham pastry for breakfast. There is smoke sitting on the horizon, like bad smog. We rise 100 metres over the first few kilometers as we head out of Albergaria-a-Velha and towards Albergaria-a-Nova. The guide says that we will be in a forest section just after we pass a church at the halfway point between the town's but we seem to have missed the arrow. The road will take us there, though it is a little longer and less enjoyable. Just as we think we must be getting close to the town a yellow arrow points us into the eucalyptus forest. It doesn't seem to be in the same position as the map but we have had these small discrepancies before. After two weeks of following yellow arrows we have learnt to trust them when it doesn't agree with what we see or with what think we know.

After a while we can see the town through the forest and then the arrows disappear. We reach a fork in the track and have to decide to head towards the town or continue to walk parallel to it. A woman passes by and confirms that the town we see is A-a-Nova, so we take that track. After 200 metres we are on a small dirt path. We turn a corner and enter the back of a shack. With the dog barking I walk between the shack and outhouse and confirm that there is no road in this dwelling's front yard. We back track to the edge of the cornfield and take a look towards the town. I can see that there are power lines running towards the town, which mean a road.  If we can get across three corn fields we will be back on track. There are gaps in the corn so I beat a path through the weeds and we eventually emerge near the road, wet and with a few blackberry scratches. After we climb through a grape trellis we are back on track. As we cross the train tracks the arrows reappear, and I can see that we should have taken a much earlier track through the forest. Hindsight is wonderful.

The rest of the day's walking gets harder as it gets hotter. Today's temperature is 29 degrees. Some of our walking is alongside a train track. We see a train on it just before we walk on it but not for the rest of the day.

At 2pm we stop at the town before our destination, Oliveira de Azeméis. We meet a Korean girl heading south. She has been sick and staying in Porto a week. It's fun to share stories and recommendations for places to stay. We tell her about how few walkers to Fatima there are ahead and which places are really worth seeing if she is going to skip parts, which she is considering.

We start our final 10km stretch at around 4pm and reach our destination at 7:30pm. We have walked 29kms today. It would have been longer if a woman hadn't called out to us as we walked past her corner house. She directed us down to the right of her house when we were heading straight ahead. People here are amazingly helpful.

I find a hotel and Carlos goes to the volunteer firefighters, as there are no albergues here. We will meet in the morning.

This has been day 14, I have been walking for two weeks and I have covered 342kms; plus detours, wrong turns, sight seeing and evening strolls.

Today's photos: 1. Sunrise through smoke. 2. Making a new path through the corn. 3. Walking the train line. 4. Spot the arrows. 5.An old bridge. 6. Nearing our destination. 7. The church in the square (which is actually a circle).