First big purchase: new boots!

I confess that I'm a bit obsessed when it comes to buying new things: whatever technical equipment I intend to buy, whether we're talking about cameras, laptops or a birds guidebook (!), I spend days searching the web for the most efficient and high quality affordable item (this always seems to annoy Luís). Quality-price ratio is something I value very much, and that applies to everything, including hiking boots. And when you're planning on walking 800km in little over 30 days, you better get good footwear!

The thing is that when you want to buy a laptop, things are pretty simple: I look for the best specifications I can get within my price range and buy it wherever it's sold cheaper. If I need to order it from another country, that's fine (as long as it comes from within the European Union, as to avoid paying some unfortunate tax). The problem with boots: you have to fit them. You cannot buy boots without trying them, just because a lot of people share a good review. As they say, the best boot is the one that fits your foot, so it is very important to test them first.

So, here's my problem: in Portugal we don't have many specialized stores that sell hiking boots. We have Decathlon, that's a big sports store, with a great price range for many articles: you can buy boots from 20€ to 200€. But unfortunately, as this store covers so many sports (over 60) it doesn't offer many variety within each price (and quality) range. And other existing places selling outdoors equipment are very small, offering a very short variety of products (usually all high quality), and usually at very big prices! Either way, we didn't have many boots to try on.

We finally tried on the Lowa Renegade's. These boots felt very comfortable, both on my feet and on Luís'. We read some reviews about these boots saying that they lasted over a decade, and also some folks saying that they walked El Camino Francés in them without a single blister! So we were sold. And we bought them (first a pair for me, then we'll buy a pair for Luís)!

Next step: breaking them in.