Subtitled by order: Rodney’s birthday
On yet another perfect blue sky day, a day that would be perfect for lazing on a beach, we left the coast and headed inland. Gertie Garmin GPS informed us that it was only 77kms to our destination, but we were wary that she might want to take us along a road marked in our atlas as ‘road in bad condition’. So I worked out a longer route that would take us via Aljustrel and Ferreira de Alentejo. It was a pleasant drive, nothing exceptional for a long way, just thousands of eucalypts and cork trees. We’ve just discovered that Portugal is the largest producer of cork in the world, which comes in rather handy when they also produce a lot of wine and port….. We’ve also just realised that there aren’t any kookaburras sitting in the old gum trees, so we better send a few of them over to Portugal, along with the koalas.
We got a bit lost north of Aljustrel, because we couldn’t find any sign posts to Ferreira; there were sign posts to towns in every direction, but not the one we wanted. But it didn’t matter; we enjoyed the unintended diversion through fields and fields of sunflowers, all just starting to come into bloom. We passed a large area of square shallow ponds with irrigation channels leading in all directions. As we drove through the midst of them we watched a small white plane flying low over them, back and forth, right and left. We were trying to work out what it was doing and then panicked as it flew straight at us! Rodney shouted “what the **** is he doing?”, while I was quickly trying to decide if he was wanting to use our piece of road as a landing strip. Because you’re reading this, it’s fairly obvious that he missed us, but we think Eileen got sprayed as if she was a bit of blue green algae or a pest of some sort. We shut all the windows and vents as quickly as we could and didn’t open them again until we finally found Ferreira de Alentejo.
We’d been warned by Ian and Ann that our next campsite was in the ‘middle of nowhere’, so we settled our nerves by stocking up at the Intermarche and then let Gertie Garmin lead us to Camping Markadia, somewhere near Odivelas. As we checked in at reception I had proof as to why I don’t always rely on the GPS, she can get us lost too, or should I say drowned…..
So we stayed on dry land, picked a lovely spot with the best view of the lake and settled in to an afternoon of being retired. Rodney’s choice of birthday food was a hot dog for lunch and a chicken curry for dinner. Both washed down with a bit of wine. An interesting choice, and definitely not as gourmet as yesterday’s meal on the beach. The overall impression of the campsite was of peace and calm, but the striking, shy, azure winged magpies, which we had admired earlier on this year’s expedition, were not quite the same as the ones living here. These ones were cheeky beyond belief. They would jump on the table to eat crumbs, sit on our chairs, looking for crumbs and if there weren’t any crumbs, they would hang out in the trees around us and look menacing. Their little black caps made them look like bandits and we think that’s what they were. Another tip, don’t sit under them, they are prolific pooers, as my hair discovered, mid-afternoon.
Meanwhile, inside the van there was another war happening. Every time we opened a cupboard we would find a few ants; little tiny ones and despite removing contents and spraying, they kept moving and we kept displacing them. Now some of them are becoming very long-distance travellers; I’m calling them Wilburys from now. And that battle continues…..
After dinner we set off on a stroll, but we didn’t get very far. The restaurant was open, so we decided to have another birthday drink before they closed. As we ordered our drinks at the bar, a Dutch couple called over to us. They recognised us from some previous campsites, in fact they were parked right next to us at Isla Cristina in Spain. We couldn’t decide on who was following who. We asked if we could join them at their table, thinking they had finished eating and they welcomed us over. Then their meal arrived, oops. But they insisted on us staying and also invited another Dutch couple over from an adjoining table. The six of us talked and drank for hours and the waitress informed us that they would close at 10:30pm, but it was definitely closer to 11pm by the time we left. Cleverly we all managed to get lost trying to find our vans in the dark. We split up when we thought we were close, bumped in to each other again and then all got the giggles. We were still laughing when we finally found Eileen.
And so we did manage to celebrate Rodney’s birthday with some displaced Dutch funsters and he woke up on Thursday morning knowing he had definitely had too many wines and beers the night before. Oh and two magpies tried to steal the toast from our breakfast table, hmm.
