PortuGeezers

We had a nice drive yesterday avoiding the tollways ... as I have said before the lack of traffic especially compared to the UK is unreal.

Here we are stopped at a major service station!!

Is anybody out there!!!

We decided to cut the north west corner of northern Spain off and so we turned directly south towards Portugal.  

We ordered a new Tom Tom map of Europe the day before we left ... easy peasy we thought - you just download it to your computer then onto Tom Tom ...  no bloody chance!!  Every morning at our Maccas wifi stop we have been trying to get the bloody thing working!  We have become very friendy with Mr Kumal, the customer service chap, from Tom Tom!  Just as we thought we were there we found that the maps we had ordered were too big for our device, so Kumal recommended that we buy a micro SD Card for the Tom Tom.  We had fun at a small town photographic shop trying to buy one - we kept saying 'SD card', pointing at our Tom Tom and drawing little squares on the counter and she kept bringing out batteries!!  We got there in the end.  

We took the computer and the Tom Tom, plus new SD card, into Maccas expecting to be able to load it up but ... I won't go on - needless to say, it didn't work and we were on the email to Kumal again!  Basically, we ended up loading up the new map on overnight instead - it took 12 hours to load up, using the caravan park wifi!

Now where were we?  Oh yes, we crossed a river and we were suddenly in Portugal, oh and the clocks went back an hour!

We stopped at a proper camp site at Caminha as we had to do some big washing and we fancied a two day stop.

We moored up under an large pine tree ... problem was it was blowing a hoolie and bloody great big pine cones kept hitting the roof and scaring the dogs half to death ...

We hooked up the shore power and took the doggies for a walk towards the beach ...

The wind had died down by now ...

The beach is at the mouth of a river (Minho) so there was a lot of driftwood on it ... oh, and dogs weren't allowed so we did a u-turn.  No runabout for Bombo here :(

We had a relaxed night and I made the worst seafood paella ever ... even the dogs wouldn't eat it!

This morning we walked the couple of k's into town, and what a cracker of a town it was ...

There was a lovely square in the middle of the town with restaurants and bars around the perimeter ...

Of major importance, the weather had really warmed up ... this is what we have been chasing!  (Elaine even made Sammie wear his tee shirt today, so he didn't get sun burn!)

We then went for a walk around the narrow streets ...

... once again there were only locals about, we spotted about four other people with cameras!

Like Spain there was absolutely no litter, there are bins everywhere.  What went wrong in the UK regarding litter?

Look what we found in the grounds of a church ... A Hillman Imp!!  Dead original with no rust whatsoever, still a bloody hideous looking car though!

Looking out from the old fort ....

After all the walking it was time to head back to the bar for some liquid refreshment ...

A couple of beers and a nice lunch for 10 Euros - equivalent to £8.00 (or about AU $14.00) for two!!

We walked back to the van and chilled.  Elaine made up some magic veggie kebabs for dinner but I realised we had run out of wine, so I took the treadlie off the back of the van and peddled like a madman to the local bottlo!  Three bottles of wine for the equivalent of £2.40 or $4.30 each!  I have also run out of my bottles of Doombar, so it's lager, lager, lager from now on.

We will carry on heading south tomorrow ... hopefully the new u-beaut TomTom map of Europe will be a winner!