Braga, Portugal

Wed 16th April

It’s been a doozy of a day and to make matters worse, our campsite is 5km from the nearest shop and we’re down to our last 2 beers.

We attempted our longest drive yet, from Segovia, Spain to Braga, Portugal. The TomTom said it’d take just over 7 hours, but 12 hours later we finally pulled into our campsite. We can’t really blame it on the GPS - just really bad luck with finding a campsite, and then further bad luck once we finally got there.

The day started earlier than I’d ever get up for work but we wanted to get on the road and crack through this 7 hour drive to have enough time to set-up camp on the other end. At one point, the TomTom even said we’d even be in by 2:30pm. Oh how wrong TomTom was indeed.

The drive into the Minho Valley of northern Portugal was stunning and the last few hours to Braga flew by as we stared out the window at the steep pastures filled with long-horned bulls and old wrinkled faces chucking their hoes into the cliffside vineyards.

Then the trouble started. We pulled into Braga around 5:30pm and discovered that this city was not built for brutes like our purple. TomTom kept leading us through tiny narrow streets where either pedestrians or seemingly parked cars darted out at us from every direction. After 20 minutes, we decided that even if there was a campsite in the centre of the city, we certainly didn’t want to find it.

So on to Gueriemas, where according to our campervan book, there was a beautiful well-kept campsite that opened on April 1st at the very tippy top of the mountain overlooking the city. Switchback after switchback we climbed a hair-raising narrow cobblestone drive until we found the car park and the front gates shut. Not a single other caravan in site. One of the guards appeared from behind the bushes after we rang the number posted to the front door and confirmed our fears – the campsite was not open yet. Fortunately he had a Portugal camping book and pointed us in the direction of a 3rd campsite. I wrote down the phone number just in case and we took off in hopes that 6:30pm wasn’t too late to find someone at reception.

By far the worst drive of the day, as TomTom chose the narrowest, bumpiest and terrifyingly steep roads, eventually claiming we’d reached our destination at 2 dirt tire tracks leading into a thick eucalyptus forest. We decided to brave it and eventually the dirt road led out into another neighbourhood where we found our saviour. A lovely man around 50-years old was standing in the street talking to a neighbour and even though he didn’t speak a word of English and we didn’t speak a word of Portuguese or French, he jumped into his car and guided us to the campsite.

After checking in at 7:30pm, we settled down for a beer to calm our frustration and listened to the rain start to pummel away on the rooftop. Just when we felt relaxed, we heard drip…drip…drip. The sunroof was leaking and quickly getting worse! There was no way to plug it with the roof being so wet so we turned the van around to change the slope of the car, which is when we noticed that the rear right tire seemed awfully low. So the fun will continue into tomorrow. This is the part of the trip that builds character, right?