Miles yesterday = 130
Miles today = 135
Miles so far = 951
Countries visited = 4
Where are we? - Porto
We’re in Portugal! Having firmly established our credentials as fluent Spanish speakers, we now have to start all over again. Why did I ever think Spanish and Portuguese were similar? We just about managed to master gracias, and now I’m in obrigado land!
Decided Porto is worth a two night stop, and with immaculate timing we have arrived at a weekend when hotels are 99% booked - its probably some holiday or other. But dogged determination has found us a great place in the centre of the town and tomorrow we will have a comprehensive e explore of what we are told is a lovely city - and just possibly we will try out a port cellar. But before that I have run out of clean clothing - don’t need to go into detail, but some serious sock and undies washing is needed…
So to the ride… I am probably going to offend someone (probably someone Spanish) but I have to admit to being slightly disappointed with the roads in this part of Spain. Since we have left the mountains of the north and hit the coast it actually feels like an endless development of small urban spaces; rarely do we get to the actual sea, and we are forever slowing down to 30mph (or 50kph actually) for tiny villages, after which it is often impossible to know when you can raise the speed again. Im sure I have spent most of the day inadvertently breaking the speed limit - by travelling at 40mph!
There were some exceptions and there are clearly some lovely beaches along the north west coast of Spain - but it ain’t the greatest motorbiking country. C’est la vie, as they say here in Portugal!
The last part of our day today was a dash for Porto, where we will swap our bikes tomorrow for a bit of culture (and some port).
Yesterday, was much the same story; we deliberately decided to avoid the big city of Vigo (home of Celta Vigo in the Spanish first division, I think - we passed the ground today), and stay the night in what we thought was a quaint seaside village. We were expecting Mevagissey - we got Luton-by-the-Sea. But as ever we made the most of it and it turned out that first sight was a bit deceiving - at any rate we found a good bar and good food - and the cafe under the hostel (yep, I got that word right) served us late into the night, or was it really into the morning? I shouldn’t put down hostels, this in fact was called one but had ensuite rooms and was clean. And it was cheap. If I could have worked out how to put my blinds down to avoid the light at 4am it would have been perfect!
Yesterday we also stopped a the superb Soutomaior Castle, beautifully restored and a history lesson on the Galician families of renown. We also came across the theory that Christopher Columbus was a Galician, and could even have been the great Pedro Madruga, whose death might have been faked so that he could take the persona of the famous seafarer. Not, not sure I quite got it either - but thats all my small brain will remember, so you will have to look it up! Great castle though! And we crossed this really cool bridge, that looked pedestrianised, until we saw cars coming the other way - which we had to wait for as it was single track!
