Thursday 13 March 2014

We've been a little quiet over the last few days because, well, we haven't done anything. The site at Manta Rota proved to be just what we wanted so, apart from a walk on the beach, we just relaxed in the beautiful warm sunshine. However, conscious that we are supposed to be heading home at the end of the month, guilt made us move on.

We've already mentioned that our friend John Hall lived on the Algarve so we contacted him and made arrangements to visit. So yesterday we travelled to his home inland from Loule, using the back roads - mainly the N124. As an aside, this is a great drive to traverse the Algarve without touching any of the beach resorts and winds its way round a totally different scenery of forests and mountains. John lives in this part of the Algarve and despite vague directions the satnav took us straight to his door and we managed to park in his driveway for an overnight stop.

A pleasant afternoon catching up and a walk to the local village while he kindly let us use his washing machine was later followed up by a trip into Loule for a meal at a very nice restaurant, including a jug of excellent local wine and a shot of "moon-shine" - they called it cleaning your teeth.....

John keeps various livestock, including chickens - yes a rooster who can't tell the time and woke us at an ungodly hour. We tried to ignore him but eventually we gave in for an earlier start than normal. This did however give us the opportunity of inspecting a piece of land (well half a mountain) that John has bought with a view to touristic development and we spent an interesting hour considering the possibilities - but there is still a lot of research to do. Coffee in another local village and then return to Johns house where we extracted Bertie and said our goodbyes.

Despite the welcome use of the washing machine we still had a couple of loads to do - that's the problem with the nomadic life! - so we decided our next port of call must include laundry facilities. Research threw up the interestingly-named site of Chicken Run which we had read about on the forum so we set the satnav.

Continuing along the N124, we passed by the attractive town of Silves and then across the bridge we remembered from last year at Portimao.

Bridge over estuary at Portimao

We could see no obvious route to Chicken Run and when the satnav turned us off the main road through the narrow streets of a tiny village we feared that it was off on one of it's own little adventures again, made worse when we turned up a track that according to the netbook ended up underneath the motorway! Oh ye of little faith! It unerringly took us right to the gate of a site that looked at first glance, well, interesting but we were made very welcome by an English couple, who managed the place for another English couple. We selected a nice open grassy pitch and came to realise that it was very much like the Caravan Club CL's we like to use in the UK - basic but with all we needed, including laundry facilities.

Then it started to rain - fortunately only a local shower or two so we're not worried. We'll probably stay a few days here to at least get the washing done.