14 October 2022 - Back among the pines

Miles driven today = 53

Total Miles to date = 2,333

In all honesty I don't have a great deal to report today.  We seem to have left the misty mornings behind and our drive down from Fig la Foz to Nazare was largely uneventful.

We are down to our last half tank of LPG.  We left the UK with both of our 11kg tanks full to the brim so we have used approximately 30 litres to date, so that's about £5 worth a week for all of our cooking plus the hot water and the fridge when we are not on hook up or on the road.  We've not had any need to put the heating on to date but I still reckon that's pretty good going.

However, with only about 10 days' supply left we need to find somewhere to fill up fairly soon or we will have no way of making the morning brew.  I have the MyLPG app on my phone and we headed for one garage who could supposedly help us but they were all out and another couple of additional luckless swerves into filling station forecourts were equally fruitless, so the search will continue when we next hit he road.

We are parked up at Camping Orbitur Valado which is a little way out of the seaside town of Nazare.  We had read that a number of vans have had problems here with getting stuck in the sandy soil so we made sure we could find a spot that was firm and reasonably level before coughing up for 2 nights.

We are underneath the pine trees again and we still haven't got rid of all the needles from the last time.  But we've learnt our lessons from our previous experience and won't be putting the awning out for fear of clogging the mechanism again.

Apart from a brief excursion round the local supermarkets on my bike to source a jar of anchovies for tonight's tea, the rest of the day has mainly been spent laundering and doing all the other domestic stuff which we have to sort out every so often.

In fact the most exciting thing that happened in our day was finding these processionary caterpillars marching across our groundsheet when we returned from the laundry.  The hairs on these little fellas can provoke a nasty allergic reaction if you handle them and there are warning notices at reception to keep pets well away.

We have just booked ourselves into a campsite on the outskirts of Lisbon for 3 nights starting Monday.  We had hoped to stay somewhere near Sintra but there are no campsites there and motorhome break-ins are rife it seems so we've opted for a secure base from which to explore both Sintra and Lisbon itself.

But before we worry about all that we will get the bikes out again tomorrow and see what Nazare has to offer and then there are a couple more interesting sounding places to exlore en-route to Lisbon on Sunday and Monday.  

15 October 2022 - Nazaré