Day 50 - off to the coast!

I spoke too soon about Marla adjusting to the time change…. She was trying to wake us up from 6am this morning…. We were not impressed. We managed to ignore / distract her until 6:45am.

We have had a lovely couple of nights in amongst the trees and countryside, but with the weather being so lovely I wanted to head to the coast for a while, so as soon as we’d all eaten breakfast and packed up the van, we hit the road.

Today’s excitement was that I drove on the wrong side of the road - not once but twice. The sat nav said to turn left, so I did but I forgot to turn up the road on the right hand side and there was a traffic island blocking the way to get onto the correct side of the road so I made an interesting set of manoeuvres to try and be on the correct side. Unfortunately I ended up then facing the way I had just come from, so I headed back down the road to the road about I’d just come off from to turn around. This is where I went on the wrong side of the road again, thankfully the car coming towards me was a fair way off (but close enough for me to realise I was in the wrong!). Annoyingly, after all this - when I finally got back to the left turn where it all started to go wrong, Garmin didn’t want me to go that way - so it was all for nothing.

We had to stop at a petrol station today, and I think we found the most expensive diesel so far… €1.65 a litre, and we were fairly low so for the first time we spent over €100 filling up. To try and soften the blow, I also bought some Monster and (rather fake) chocolate croissants.

Back on the road and the plan was to head to a supermarket in Aveiro then straight to camp.

Parking in the supermarket was interesting. There was plenty of room, so I tried to park in the shade so Charlie and Marla wouldn’t get too hot but we were shoo’d away by a man doing some sort of construction in the car park. We then noticed the many Jurassic Park trucks and decided to listen to the man and park somewhere else…..

My turn to go in, it was a pretty big shop and a bit overwhelming! I’ve never seen such a large fish counter in a shop before. I came out with a few meals and even some salad vegetables. It’s the first supermarket I’ve been into where there wasn’t a complicated way of buying fruit and veg.

Back to the van for a quick bite to eat, then off the our next campsite - Parque Municipal de Campismo - Praia de Mira. We have been to this area before, many years ago when we cycled from Porto to Lisbon.

The camp is extremely basic. No toilet seats, no toilet roll and no hot water for washing up. We are going to move a bit further down the coast tomorrow to hopefully a nicer site….

This afternoon we had a little wander around the edge of the lagoon that’s just in front of the campsite. We were going to head to the sand dunes and beach, but we couldn’t find our way out the camp easily, and by the time we got out, it was getting a bit too warm for Marla. So we had a gentle still near the lagoon as it was closer.

Marla’s body clock was still off this afternoon and we had a lot of hints that it was dinner time from 2:30pm. At 3:30 we caved, she was sat on the floor next to the drawer where her food is kept, just staring at it!

Dinner tonight for us was veggie hot dogs and chips. I made a rookie mistake when buying the hot dogs and didn’t realise there were 5, and I bought 6 buns - guess who ended up with a chip bun…Leggi altro