The Portuguese Camino is very quiet compared to the maybe 5,000 hikers a day starting and hiking this trail only a month ago. I see maybe 20-30 hikers a day and the fewer hikers makes it easy to reconnect with hikers you continually see on the trails each day. The relaxed hiking of 20 km or 13 miles a day allows for a lot of time to chat at coffee and food stops along the way. I’ve been intentional about creating trail families with other hikers I met on this Camino trip.

The tramily – short for trail family grows and shrinks daily as some hikers hike slower or faster or exit the trail or get injured and new members are added.

Starting within the first 2 hours of my hike in Porto , I’ve met other incredible Camino hikers that just magically connect and share time and conversations with me. I make an effort to get their contact information and potentially build a trail family and reconnect that night for meals and lodging or the next day for hiking and just continuing the conversations.

For the past 5-6 days, each day is filled with conversations with hikers often hiking in groups of 2 or 4 or 5 and we rotate conversations and often stop at lunch and coffee stops together. Most are flexible for the destination and evening lodging and dinners. It continues into another day and the group grows. People add, others fall back only to appear again a day later.

It’s hard to explain and even harder to understand why these new friendships and conversations just magically happen quickly and easily on the Camino and many other hiking multiple day trails.