Thursday 1st December 2022
Today is to be the start of our quick trip through Portugal. We left some of our breakfast groceries at the shop last night, so after a quick walk to purchase them again we were on our way at about 10am. We walked to the parking garage near our apartment, unfortunately the parking is quite expensive in the cities, we were only expecting 24hrs (25 euro) but unfortunately we were there 40 hours so it was 50 euro. Ouch! Oh well, we had a couple of good nights in Sevilla and the accommodation was pretty cheap. We headed on our way to Portugal, the traffic in Sevilla was quite hectic but once out on the motorway it was clear sailing. It was like a ghost freeway there was so little traffic. Whenever we came out of a tunnel David said it felt like we were the only survivors of the holocaust until he saw the next car. We finally crossed the border at 10.50am. This was a little time consuming as we came to a toll checkpoint where we had to register our credit card so it could charge us automatically via cameras and number plate recognition cameras. After working out how to set this up, we were on our way again. We then drove along the freeway for a short time, then David decided to head out towards the beach. This was unsuccessful as it was more time consuming and there wasn’t a great deal to see. We drove through the town of Olhao and a few others. In the end we popped back on the motorway and enjoyed the scenery from there. We stopped at Praia da Marinha and did a hike along the Seven Hanging Valleys trail. This was a coastal walk with views similar to that of the Twelve Apostles on the Great Ocean Road in Victoria or the rocks at Maitland Bay. It was a very pretty coastline with lovely white houses along the coast as well. We were lucky the rain was imminent but didn’t eventuate. Thank goodness. The walk took us about 2 hours and was a welcome break. We then continued on our way at around 3.30pm. We have had a time change as we crossed the border and we are now 11 hours behind Central Coast time. We were going to try to get as close to Lisbon as possible tonight. We drove through some beautiful lush green farmland. It appeared they just built the freeway away from all the towns as we hardly passed any in the afternoon drive. We fell a little short of Lisbon and are staying in a little room at a small town called Landeira. It is run by a lovely lady who only speaks Portugese and French, and very little English. We only have the basics of Portuguese again – Hello – Ola, Goodbye-Adeus, Please – Por Favor, Thankyou-Obrigardo, Yes-Sim, No-No and toilet. We managed to communicate most things but used google translate by talking into the speaker which converted it on the fly. Life has been made so much easier when you travel with the new technical tools. They are good for some things.