Zamora and then Porto

Largely uneventful on our way to our 3rd freebie overnighter - except for a small programming error which led the GPS to send us into the up the hill into the middle of old town Zamora! Buts that’s all we saw of it as we re-programmed and went to the stop down in the town motorhome stopover carpark. Very popular place this is with well over a dozen vans sitting there on our arrival. The toilets turn out to be a couple of Portaloos but will be fine for our short overnighter.

Next day, we get going relatively early from Zamora. As we leave the free carpark we realise that there at least 20 vans here - so either everyone is going somewhere and this is just a night stopover, or we are missing something here in Zamora. Oh well, we have places to be. We program Maps to take us a slightly longer way, which is all 4 lane highway to avoid an ‘N’ road that is shorter but longer in time. So today is about 400kms we need to cover.

So far so good, but as we enter the mountains it starts to rain, and then the fog closes in. It’s hard going for the driver, and even harder for the co-pilot. We follow another motorhome for some time, which makes the task a bit easier. They pull into a mountain top servo, so we do as well and have our lunch. While we have ours in the van, inside the restaurant there is a hundred people or more - so that’s why the carpark is absolutely full of cars and trucks! We always wonder whether the people sitting there drinking are going to be driving anywhere soon (including the truckies). Back on the road, it’s a bit clearer for a while, then more heavy fog, and the driver has to concentrate pretty hard. But things are going well, and we cross into Portugal.

Our drive on the way:

Oh oh, the brownie points that the driver has been accumulating has diminished- he has forgotten that as soon as we cross the border into Portugal, our ESims don’t work as we have specific country ones (the data is much cheaper that way, and when you are watching hours of F1 it chews it up pretty quickly).

So although, miraculously, the Maps directions keeping working for ages, eventually we get voice directions but no maps - bugger! Our campsite has advised us to take a different route to what the Maps will suggest, so we are relying on knowing where we are going and when to turn off.
We make a couple of stops at Servos until eventually we find one with wifi for us to tap into to update our Sims back to Portugal - which takes about 30 minutes standing in the middle of the shop stealing their wifi until we finally get ours sorted.

The rest of the trip is thus uneventful, but it’s a long drive day of about 8 hours (and for once the driver agrees with the stupid van when it tells him he is fatigued every 10 minutes).

We are pleased to pull into Istas Gardens at Vila Nova de Gaia, our home for the next 4 nights. If you were with us in 2019, you probably remember that we stayed here then (no? That’s okay). Back then it had only been open a couple of months, and the grounds were pretty bare, but we really enjoyed it, so we had to come back. The owners, Pedro and Claudia built it in the ‘backyard’ of their new home. It looks really wonderful now that all the trees have grown, and a few other developments suggest we will really enjoy it again (notwithstanding the weather forecast). Our check in process is lovely, a glass of wine, a tour of the facilities, advice on transport and tour options, and some dark chocolate and a wee bottle of port for a nightcap - you got me 😀.

Our campsite and welcome port and chocolate 👍👍

Adeus for now.