It's over....

The blog break that is :-)

We spent 2 weeks with our first visitors and had a great time.  We had tried to save as much sightseeing as possible till Susie's mum and dad arrived so that we would all enjoy it, and we did! Well we can only speak for the two of us of course... The highlights for us were going to Batalha with the absolutely amazing monestary, which we didn't expect at all (see http://www.travel-in-portugal.com/Batalha/)

Batalha monestary

 and the San Antonio caves (see http://www.grutassantoantonio.com/en/index.html). 




The San Antonio cave



We also had some spectacular food at Solar dos Amigos (see http://www.solardosamigos.com/), which I think we were all impressed with, one portion was enough to share between the 4 of us!!!!

Re the house..... We had some bad-ish news re the collapsing banks and were told by 2 people it would cost us up to 50,000 euros to support them. We were pretty beat for a while but decided not to worry about it during our "holiday".  However, during this last week we had a man who does a lot of digging work, and deals with banks like ours a lot, up there and he did not seem to think it was as serious and had a few ideas.  We are waiting to hear back from him re costs and timing. He said the best time to do anything would be April/May time when all the rains have stopped.

Speaking of rains.... we have had fantastic weather lately.  While Susie's parents were here we only had 1 day of rain and a few days of clouds and cold but some really lovely days too, where we could sit outside for lunch and enjoy the sun.  This last week started off cold with 1 degree on the Tuesday morning but got up to 19 degrees by Friday lunchtime. So there is still hope that the summer WILL arrive!