Autumn 2018

Rio Tinto (Porto) - 10 October 2018

Tried to fix the sliding cupboard catch, after an hour, failed. Filled up with LPG, diesel and food and drove to the outskirts of Porto.

10 October

Ha, so much for a peaceful sleep listening to waves. We’d just gone to bed, and the foghorn started! My little periscope, Tintin looked out through the roof hatch, and could see the lights all down the coast, and no fog! 20 minutes or so later, we started to get dressed to move, and it stopped - so back to bed. Then woken about 2.30 when it started again! Not a noise we could ignore, being so close! Nothing for it, pjs on, and sleepily drove back to the Aire we’d been at earlier, arriving about 3 in the morning!

For today we sort of planned driving around, finding a beach and just sitting and reading. The reality was that it was very windy, and clouded over - so probably not very nice near beaches!

In the end Tintin spent about an hour taking the curved cupboard door off to try and repair the catch with the newly superglued catch. Didn’t work 😕

Tintin drove, topped up with gas, then drove to a Lidl for another food stock up. Even in Portugal they are selling the Goodness Gang as in the Co-op in Guernsey 🇬🇬 Also bought a couple or erasers, seeing as we still can’t find the elusive rubber door stops. As you can hopefully see from the picture, it’s the best we can do for now to stop the cupboard from flying open around corners!

Then topped up with diesel, probably at the best price we saw all day €1.43/litre. Living the dream today! Then drove for about 90 minutes to:

Rio Tinto - free

The drive was very different, not on motorways - slow and stuck in traffic. Some roads were really bad! Seems to be lots of vegetable growing going on, and roadside stalls for purchasing. Somehow seemed a poorer area we were driving through. Glad Tintin was driving through the suburbs of Porto, very busy - also quite a few people seem to just park on the side of the road, jutting out, which makes it harder when driving past in a moho!