Too posh to camp!

We awoke early, well we didn’t really sleep well. The site was very noisy, traffic was flowing very fast on the road by the site which went on all night, there was dogs barking somewhere and to top it all someone was shooting something through the night, Ben was beside himself and tried most of the night to get out of the tent.

At around 2am we decided that we would pack up and leave in the morning. We did eventually get a bit of sleep but not much.

I took the dogs to the beach early for a long walk, it was very pleasant, almost empty and the dogs ran for miles, so far Ben now has a bad limp. We packed up and had showers then headed off, explaining to the woman in the reception that it was just too noisy for us, she agreed and there were a few other people checking out for the same reason. On the whole it was not a nice area, we saw a few more hookers on the way out and we just felt it was a bit of a dump.

We had always planned to go to Portugal so we thought as we were this close we better pop over the border and have a look.

 

We drove across this bridge to get into Portugal, it is a stunning structure and the clear blue skies make it all the better, it is our first brand new country on this trip.

We found ourselves in Monte Gordo, we saw the sign and and Susan thought that Mum had had a holiday here in the past so with nothing better to do we followed our noses and landed in Monte gordo.   We kind of followed our noses towards a car park by the beach. This is where we had our latest interaction with the Police. Just as we drove into the car park we saw a load of them and they called us over. Susan tried her best to converse with them in Spanish but it was not happening when eventually they realised we spoke English and out came a couple of cops that spoke very good English. Apparently we had driven through a no entry sign. I was not sure what was going on but Susan reckons that we were close to getting a ticket but we were nice to them so we got off with a telling off and comments about getting new glasses – just spent over £100 on RayBans!!!

These are the no entry signs we missed, how could we?

We drove back over the border to Spain and headed back to Cortes. There was some discussion about finding a new site but I was just not keen to go to the hassle of putting the tent up again.

We stopped at the same service station and had another lovely lunch in the sun. On the way back we stopped for a short walk outside Benajoan, we took these photographs of the limestone crags round this area.

Glad to be back, we did learn a few things though. How we will ever get all our junk back in the car in 4 weeks time is worrying me slightly. We’ll have a practice run soon so that we can work out the best arrangement.