Aveiro - 20 October 2018

20 October

Curry ok, decision for Tintin to drink wine wasn’t! Headache 🤕 this morning. Last night we had decided to drive to Aveiro, described in the Lonely Planet book as the Venice of Portugal...

Tintin drove, nearly two hours. Such different scenes in one day! This morning it was mile after mile of forest, still seems to be mainly eucalyptus globulus. In 1866, 35,000 eucalyptus trees were planted in Coimbra (not far from here) and today the trees cover 7% of Portugal. Sadly, fauna can’t feed on the trees, or find refuge, the insects can’t eat it, so there are no birds. The trees are used for pulp, and economically still cheaper to transport from Europe than Brazil. However, people are buying fewer newspapers, and there are fears that the landowners could not afford to revert into native cork forest, and also - people are now using screw tops for wine! Real problems!

Some of our journey was on the electronic toll roads again. I wonder how many people would like James Bond revolving number plates to avoid the charges - or is that just me?! They must be pretty good cameras to catch everyone!

We used Park4night, and parked in a car park near to Aveiro. Quick lunch, walked over the bridge into the town. The ‘moliceiro’ - traditional seaweed harvesting boats which have now been converted for tourist use, are along many of the canals. It was up to about 28°, and had a very touristy feel about the place. Even had a McDonalds amongst the upmarket, and then touristy shops.

We were really hot, so next stop - 30 minutes away, Costa Nova - the beach! Another free space where moho parking is tolerated - but no services are provided. Quick change into bathers, short walk over the boardwalk onto the beach. Just love the sound of the ocean crashing around! Laid out and read our books for a while, well until the sun disappeared behind bigs clouds and didn’t look like it was coming out again for a while! Not bad, on the beach in October! Had no idea this morning we’d be doing that!

Went for a walk into ‘town’. Lots of the houses have colourful vertical stripes! It’s fair to say that Co-Pilot lost the plot again, some of the streets were so narrow, with cars parked either side, Tintin skillfully got us here in one piece!  However, in front of us is a huge Phoenix moho, Dutch - they definitely would not have fitted on our route, so there must be better ways!

So, mountains, salt marshes and the beach all in a few hours - very pleasant day maybe more so because it was a little unexpected.

Now back to that dilemma - where next!