Portugal

Bruno woke us as he left for work this morning and we slowly roused ourselves, cleaned, packed and kitted up. We were dragging our feet somewhat partly because we didn´t really want to leave because our hosts had made us feel so at home but also perhaps because we were still a bit tired. Ed is STILL recovering from the evening on Day 9 I think!

So we left quite late and pootled along the coast in glorious sunshine to Lisbon.

When we got there we missed the left turn we should have taken and spent the next 30 minutes at least trying to sort ourselves out. Finally we got back to the Golden-gate-esque double decker bridge and shortly after navigating lots of roadworks stopped for a late lunch (it was gone 3pm by now!).

After lunch we took lots of small roads and had great fun riding towards Sagres on the South-Western tip of Portugal. Some beautiful twisty roads through forests and great vistas at sunset and after that great riding with the stars out.

Arriving in Sagres I (Freak/James) was slight trepidatious as the last time I had been there I had been shot at by the military police (long story). We arrived at the junction where the magic had happened a few years ago and there was even a military police jeep at the crossroads. Flasback time and I was just hoping Ed didn´t sound the horn!! Thankfully we arrived at our hotel without incident and we´ve splashed out on a 3 star apartment tonight. Well I say splashed out - it´s only €33 which is cheap at anyone´s exchange rate!

Friday the 13th over with then and aptly we did 213 miles

Hangover today....

Bruno and George showed us around Estoril, took us to a lovely place for toasties and helped us with all our shopping. I think we may have got the wrong fuel for the stove though:

I put my numberplate back on, we got our bikes lovely and clean with a little help from a garage down the road and then George went off to work (performing for the Producers in Lisbon) and we took is easy for the evening and caught up with FanFas.

Wow, what a day.

Managed to rise and get some breakfast close to our grand residence for around €5 (and we even got some fruit!) then retreived our bikes from the garage and headed off into the sunshine. Blue skies, light winds and perfect temperatures (around 10 C) for the whole day. We were out of Aveiro in no time and on the road.

Today we stuck to the minor roads and twisted our way up and down the Portugese countryside avoiding the potholes. We stopped for lunch in Batalha and were at a bit of a loss what to order until the very helpfull waitress translated everything for us!

Afterwards we joined the most amazing coastal road towards Bruno´s place in Estoril, just West of Lisbon.

The roads were sweeping, curved, flowing, sighted, hilly and generally grippy. Generally grippy - there was one particuarly nasty corner covered in gravel which caused some excitement!! We also went past the most Westerly point of mainland Europe:

We arrived in Estoril half an hour before we were supposed to meet Bruno, but Tommy had other ideas and tried to lead us up all manner of one-way streets and non-existent roads. We eventually found our bearings after taking a nearly vertical cobbled street which someone had helpfully parked blocking the top of. My bike slowly slid back a few feet with the brakes on and nudged the front of Roger, knocking my numberplate off! Something else to add to the to-do list for tomorrow!

Speaking of which, we have given ourselves a day-off tomorrow and so has our host Bruno. We´ve already made oursleves at home and made a right mess and turned the washing machine on! Hopefully we´ll get around to tidying up the blog and adding some more photos and a couple of videos.

185 miles today, 0 tomorrow, hooray!

We set off from A Coruña at our usual time of 11ish and headed South towards Portugal.
Today the weather gods were kind to us and the sun was out for most of the day. There were a few nasty looking clouds flying around, but we managed to avoid them!

Here is a big buildup of clouds, just past the town of . . . . oh dear.

Lunch was around Vigo just north of the Spanish/Portugese border, the roads up to here were fairly quiet and as the area was relatively hilly there were some nice winding roads to open the bikes up on! Although you had to watch out for a fair number of damp patches from the rain the day before!

After lunch the Sat Nav, aptly named Tommy took us through loads of towns to avoid pay roads which slowed us up some what. So after going through the border we thought we should make up some time on one of the above and get to Porto as quick as poss!

Aveiro was recommened to us by a friend of James's and is a fairly small University town with lots of canals 60km south of Porto. We arrived here around 6ish, which would have been 7 save for the fact Portugal is the same time as England! We found a rather splendid room in a Residencia in the middle of town using our international mime/expression/sounds skills and are about to go out and test our pigeon Portugese on the locals!

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