Diary Entry – 27th January 2023

Woke up this morning about 7am to have a nice hot shower, the first one in about 6 days. I think I have mentioned before the frustration of staying on a site and the showers being cold. It is so so frustrating so it was nice today to get 3rd degrees burns for a change. Also, just how revitalised you feel after a hot shower. We had to be at CarGlass for 10am, we should have arrived at 09:46 but for some questionable directions from Lisa meant we got there at 09:59.

We went to a lovely bakery in Braga, they love a cake/ pastry shop in Portugal!! They really do, I ended having 4 of the pastry things one was a hot dog one which on paper sounds awful but it was very good, very nice. The back window and windscreen chip cost £432, we can claim £150 back from insurance company so still quite an expensive job but an essential one. We hadn’t planned our next stop either so in the bakery we looked through S4S and P4N, one of the nice places in Portugal I had researched was Pinhao they do loads of wine there, it’s in the Douro Valley which is a UNESCO heritage site. So I found us a park up on a farm and to say I found a belter is an understatement. I am extremely looking forward to my door opening video tomorrow. We have had Pizza for tea, cooked on my Cadac pizza stone. With us not having an oven the Cadac massively increases our cooking options! We’d be buggered without it!

The drive was about 2 hours and took us through the clouds and took us over 500 metres above sea level, and the views around the Douro value are sensational! We literally won the park up lottery with this park up. We followed a set of different directions than what the sat nav said else it would have taken over a huge winding road. A German chap arrived after, he was in a large Herman Hymer Motorhome towing a smart car, I asked him how he got on those roads, he replied ‘Eet Vas Han Hadventure’. I bet it bloody was. We walked to a shop after we got the sun canopy, Portuguese people love babies and they all make the same set of peculiar noises to Rory, he just stares back mainly blankly, it’s like a bugs bunny breathe through your teeth against your lip noise. Very very odd, but saying that I call him a beefy bake, so make of that what you will.