France to Portugal

We finally made it to Portugal early Tuesday morning after a somewhat long journey.  The first day after we left France we drove for a nice 8ish hours and managed to set up camp at a nice campsite before dark, had dinner and a good night sleep. Second day started off well with us making our way down quickly and smoothly.  however, when we reached the campsite, which advertised both on the internet and on a board outside that it was open, and found out that it was closed we were slightly disappointed as it was getting late and we were hungry.  We decided to drive to the next town to see if we could find another site, but only made it a few km down the motorway when Glenn noticed something weird in the mirror.... one of the wheels of the caravan had come off and was being dragged along the road creating a large amount of smoke!  So on with the high vis vests and out on the motorway to see how bad the damage was. Lucklily Glenn is a clever and very handy guy so he managed to save the caravan and get the spare wheel on (Thank you Mr and Mrs Murphy for making sure the spare tyre was there and in good condition!!!)

Anyway, so after  finding out there was no campsite in sight, having almost been hit by a driver doing 130 on the hard shoulder where we were parked and being starving we were getting pretty fed up and homesick.  We made the decision to keep driving and after a couple of hours we stopped at a restaurant and had some dinner and some chill out time before setting off again.  We then drove through most of the night with a couple of stops where we had a nap (well Susie had a few of those on the way too).

Once in Portugal we found it was raining A LOT! And it was about 8 degrees so were feeling a bit deflated and  set up camp only to find our electricity cable did not fit and the campsite had no adaptors.  No electricity means no heating and we were cold and tired, so went on an adaptor hunt. Luckily we found one in shop number  2 so not too bad.  by this time we were feeling too awake to sleep so decided to go and see the land.  It was pretty overgrown but still looked lovely so that cheered us up.So as we tried to leave we realised the car was stuck in the mud up to the sills and after a bit of digging we managed to get it out.Even this didn't dampen our spirits!!!

We did some food shopping went back to the caravan and cooked an early dinner and went to bed at 5!! Weather hadn't cleared up much so we fell asleep to the sound of rain drumming against the roof and felt pretty good after all.

Wednesday morning was completely different, woke up early(ish) to a bright sunny day! We got the caravan sorted and set the awning up, which gave us a lot more space and made everything a lot easier. We spent the afternoon going round diy shops and tried to find builders merchants etc. We got some wellies for Susie and a couple of machetes to clear the land.