SPAIN, PORTUGAL - Part 1 - Feb. 14, 2012

SPAIN, PORTUGAL – Part 1
February 14, 2012


Around the world certain brand names are easily recognizable…MacDonald’s, Pepsi, Toyota. Some

look or are spelled differently than we may be used to. This is Coke in Arabic.

Weather has turned cold…VERY cold…with temperatures at 8 C and cold winds all the way from Russia at somewhere between 25 and 5000 kph. Everyone is dressed in their best winter attire with matching complaints. This was one of those rare occasions that drinking more wine did not help. That’s how cold it was! But the scenery and the beaches are still very enjoyable.

Drove up to Seville, about 250 km. Dawn and I were here for a few days in 2008 at the start of our last big cycling trip. Seville is one of the oldest places in Spain and has the largest cathedral in the world; it is claimed to be larger than St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Not sure about that but it is huge and even more garish. The architecture is very impressive and the carvings and moldings are as overdone as any.

It is always a pleasure to take pictures of Asian tourists in these types of places. In its heyday Seville was thought to be the richest city in the world after Spanish conquerors brought back shiploads of gold taken from South America.

A tall monument with a likeness of one of Christopher Columbus’ ships, the Isabel, stands proudly in the center of the city. Chris’ second and fourth voyages started from Seville when wealthy patrons funded his voyages. (We, on the other hand, must fund our own. How times have changed!) Our time in this beautiful place was limited so we headed back to camp on the local, and inexpensive, bus.

Our Dutch friends, TV gave up while here but a call to an electronics shop saw the man come to the campground to pick it up, repair it and deliver it…on the condition that we held back Frans’ and Willemien’s German Shepard which scared the hell out of him!

And now, it’s Portugal, a country more mellow than Spain but also more serious. More old-fashioned and more simple. The countryside is hilly, beautiful, treed but quite dry and prone to forest fires, and…last but not least as for many of the countries in Europe…very broke. The overspending and the over-construction happened here as well though not to the same extent as Spain. This last part comes out in the demeanor of the people, proud but discouraged. Dawn and I went through the center of Portugal in 2002 during our first European cycling trip. We fell in love with the country and the people.

We camped about fifteen kilometers west of Faro on the southern coast. Nice campground a few hundred meters from the Atlantic shore. Hoards of Dutch with most of them riding their bikes of course. But they seem to have a peculiar way to attach training wheels. Or are these to prevent wheelies?

We probably have never shown you pictures of the inside of our van/bus/home/resort. So here they are. Remember…this is the lived-in version after we've shut down for the night.