Diary Entry – 26th January 2023

A very welcome boring day!! Rory has somehow found himself in a routine where he is waking up around 5am so by the time he has his first bottle and his first nap he is awake by p9am. That last week was about 11am. Especially in the chilly mornings here pushing him around the town we were in certainly made my legs go red in the cold for his morning walk. There was a market on in the town were at and we planned on walking around it but by the time we found somewhere for breakfast and got back towards the camper I’d got hold my insurance and got hold of a company called car glass, the Portuguese equivalent of Autoglass. Having tried to communicate with them over the phone there was a language barrier let’s say, they asked if we could take the van down. So that meant packing up the van and heading on into Braga town centre. The Portuguese are wild drivers so on top of the stress of everything else was going to interesting. After about a 20 minute wait as we got there at 13:30 and they have lunch break from 12:30 until 14:00. They looked at the van for 2 minutes and gave me a price of E400 plus another chip on the windscreen so 470 for the lot, I can claim £150 back from my insurance company. They didn’t have the panel in so I immediately thought a 3 or 4 day wait but he said he could get it done tomorrow at 10am. It takes 2 hours so hopefully by midday we should be cooking on gas!!

We managed to find a site 9 minute drive from the glass place and it is 16 euros a night including electric and we can get the Thule Sun canopy out. It makes a massive difference to space when you can pop the chairs outside and things like that. Braga is a lovely town by the way. Frustratingly only here for 1 night, the plan is to head to Porto tomorrow but I wouldn’t say no to a night here again or even back to the free park up we were at before. There was a castle on a hill that I wanted to visit but due to one stress or something another never got round to it.

I have been really surprised that there are so many free park ups with electric in Portugal I believe the electric is covered by the community to draw in tourists. It is a very clever idea they don’t seem very as precious with electricity, they have free electric, big bill boards on all the time. There mustn’t be the same cost of living pressure here as in other parts of Australia Europe. Maybe something to do with the distance from Russia or something. Really hoping for a smooth day tomorrow no hiccups or anything like that. We went to a very peculiar but nice restaurant in the centre of Braga, great fresh food again. The food we have had so far has been fantastic!

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