29 November ’05, Tuesday.
We picked a good day to leave Madrid and head onto Portugal. While driving through Madrid and the surrounding area, we had our first fog for the year. Fortunately, the fog was short lived for the sun came out strong and gave us a great day for driving. We were driving through the rolling hills that were spectacular with color from the orchard and grape vines. Some of the vines were completely void of leaves, and then others were full of colors from a dark burgundy, red, orange, and yellow. Also along the route we encountered forests “cork” oak trees. It seems that Portugal produces enough bark from the cork oak tree to supply over 30 million corks for the wine industry to cork their bottles of wine each day. That is a heck of a figure, seeing as it takes 25 years before a cork oak tree can be “barked” the first time and then it takes an additional 10 years between each harvest. Crossing from Spain into Portugal was almost like going from gray to white… Don’t get me wrong, but Spain was full of color, pretty clean throughout, wonderful people, good food, and well worth visiting. The moment we crossed the border we were driving on roads that looked new, the rolling hills seemed manicured from the roadside to the snow capped mountains 50-60 km away. All the little hill-towns with their high fortress walls, the little white homes that surround the castle at the top…not one, but just about every 30-40 km or so. Now it’s another language, different road signs, menu items at the restaurants, and different prices for gas again… Spain was less expensive for gas than France, and Portugal it seems, is more than expensive than Spain and less than France. In US dollars, we have paid as high as $9.25 a US Gallon in Turkey, about $5.00 in Spain, and about $7.+ in Great Britain. I would like to say that we have been getting great “gas mileage”, but I can’t. Ole “Bumble Bee” does OK, but it is far from getting good mileage. That’s OK, because we knew ahead that this journey wasn’t going to be done on low gas prices and low consumption. Now that we are in winter, we have to look ahead to our next campground…is it open “all year” long? This is going to be a challenge in some areas, but as we have looked at the coast of Portugal and Spain, it looks like we will be good for awhile. Most likely, the toughest will be as we head back to the Netherlands from Spain in January. Today we had 3 different campgrounds to choose from as we drove through the first leg of Portugal, but each of them was about 100 to120km away from each other. Fortunately, we had time to make it to our first choice…Évora.
We picked a good day to leave Madrid and head onto Portugal. While driving through Madrid and the surrounding area, we had our first fog for the year. Fortunately, the fog was short lived for the sun came out strong and gave us a great day for driving. We were driving through the rolling hills that were spectacular with color from the orchard and grape vines. Some of the vines were completely void of leaves, and then others were full of colors from a dark burgundy, red, orange, and yellow. Also along the route we encountered forests “cork” oak trees. It seems that Portugal produces enough bark from the cork oak tree to supply over 30 million corks for the wine industry to cork their bottles of wine each day. That is a heck of a figure, seeing as it takes 25 years before a cork oak tree can be “barked” the first time and then it takes an additional 10 years between each harvest. Crossing from Spain into Portugal was almost like going from gray to white… Don’t get me wrong, but Spain was full of color, pretty clean throughout, wonderful people, good food, and well worth visiting. The moment we crossed the border we were driving on roads that looked new, the rolling hills seemed manicured from the roadside to the snow capped mountains 50-60 km away. All the little hill-towns with their high fortress walls, the little white homes that surround the castle at the top…not one, but just about every 30-40 km or so. Now it’s another language, different road signs, menu items at the restaurants, and different prices for gas again… Spain was less expensive for gas than France, and Portugal it seems, is more than expensive than Spain and less than France. In US dollars, we have paid as high as $9.25 a US Gallon in Turkey, about $5.00 in Spain, and about $7.+ in Great Britain. I would like to say that we have been getting great “gas mileage”, but I can’t. Ole “Bumble Bee” does OK, but it is far from getting good mileage. That’s OK, because we knew ahead that this journey wasn’t going to be done on low gas prices and low consumption. Now that we are in winter, we have to look ahead to our next campground…is it open “all year” long? This is going to be a challenge in some areas, but as we have looked at the coast of Portugal and Spain, it looks like we will be good for awhile. Most likely, the toughest will be as we head back to the Netherlands from Spain in January. Today we had 3 different campgrounds to choose from as we drove through the first leg of Portugal, but each of them was about 100 to120km away from each other. Fortunately, we had time to make it to our first choice…Évora.