Cyclists prevailing
Against winds, against hillies,
Soaking up the view.
After a not particularly restful sleep in that construction site last night, we headed out on the last stretch to Portugal! It was a gorgeous ride along the rocky Atlantic coast in the morning.. the highway was positively crawling with cyclists, and we were excited to be there with them. Everyone was super friendly. :D Cycling!
At about noon we made it to the bottom of our peninsula; the crossing to Portugal was a hop away over a €,75 ferry that took about 15 minutes. We had made it to our 8th country of the trip! This time, the language barrier was going to be harder, since Portuguese is rather distinct from both Spanish and French, and the people don't tend to speak English as much as the Belgian or Dutch or Danish people in the north. It's an adventure every day.
Sunday means that shops are closed in Europe. Especially in Spain, which is a rather traditionally Catholic place, people day their day of rest seriously. Sundays mean that it's hard for us to eat anything, since all supermarkets are closed (in some really large towns, maybe one really large grocery store will be open for maybe a couple hours in the morning, but that's all), and restaurants simply don't serve enough food to keep our metabolisms satisfied for any reasonable kind of price. With our new ideal of 20€ per person-day, we can't afford to eat out all the time. Sundays are hard for us.
Not so in Portugal. It seems no one told them that everyone needs a day off on Sunday, so all their supermarkets are open! We took a photo of the hours sign we were so excited. Then we ate a crapload of really delicious food (all the produce seemed to be local; in lieu of perfect, bright fruits like we see in North America, the shelves were weighed down with lemons of all shapes and sizes with growths and imperfections and variations in shade) for a really good price and continued heading southward.
Mostly the day was unremarkable. Hot. We slept for a bit by a beach. We marveled at the nice paving of Portuguese roads--in case it interests you, French roads are the worst paved we've seen. Danish and Spanish are the best--, and we happened across a very weird purveyor of large and interesting things. We strolled around this shop for some time in the late afternoon, marvelling at giant gorilla fountains and wooden doors from all corners of the earth with suits of armour and a king's ransom of trinkets sprinkled between.
We had intended to make it to Porto this evening, but instead we stopped in a smaller town about 40km from it called Vila do Conde. The two hour push in the morning should be easy (and flat), and it's better to not push hard for now... we are going to need our energy to get from Lisboa to Tarifa. A lot of energy.