Mountains and Hotsprings

We survived the night in Chã, our little ghost town but the noises we heard as we turned the tv off were enough to make your blood curdle. At 6:30am I was wide awake and as the sun came up we were both out exploring the buildings in daylight, which was far better but still creepy.
Around 9:30am we left the the ghost town behind and headed for the peneda geres National park. The plan was to stop at 3 waterfalls so I could photograph them but that didn’t happen.
TomTom kept on trying to take us down huge hills and we got further and further from our destination. Twice I had to stop and check where we were and in the end I decided just to stick to the N roads. They weren’t main roads but I was comfortable driving on them and I could turn around if need be.
The park was beautiful, long winding roads with lots of switchbacks which did stress me out because Portugal is quite bad for road signs so if there was a low bridge or narrow road or really steep incline we probably wouldn’t be warned.
Unfortunately we couldn’t stop at the waterfalls, there wasn’t a lot of parking and one we couldn’t even get near because the road was closed so we ended up driving all the way through the park and back into Spain.
Next on the list was the lobios hot springs, and as we passed we could see the steam coming out of the river.
We found a motorhome parking spot and quickly got changed, Ellie was really looking forward to this and I think it was number one on her list. We got down to try baths and they were empty. No people, no water.
There was a small trickle of boiling water running into the river and it was that, that we had seen steaming from the road and I tried it but it was boiling on the surface and freezing below. We were well disappointed.
I checked our navigation book and the next destination was 280 miles away so I plotted it into TomTom and away we went.
15 miles from lobios, we came across a sign in Spanish that looked like hot springs, I opened park4night and there it was. A spot right next to some 2000 year old Roman baths, or hot springs. I set in the coordinates and it took us down a very steep hill but there at the bottom we’re 10 other vans and people were bathing in the Roman baths.
We did a temperature check first and they were hot, so hot some of them were bubbling, so we put on our swimming gear and went in.
Google says the springs are naturally between 36°c and 48°c and they were really hot. So hot infact that we were grateful to get out into the 10°c air temperature and also so hot that Ellie got back into Wanda, passed out and then threw up. But on a better note it does seem to have helped my knees.
We’ve decided we’re going to spend the night at the hot springs, there’s no hurry now as the weather is turning and it will only get colder the further up we go. So we’re hoping for another quiet night here tonight.Weiterlesen