Until yesterday we have pretty well been hugging the water around the extreme SE corner of Portugal, firstly along the coast then up the River Guardiana, which forms the border between Spain and Portugal. Yesteray we moved properly inland, albeit only by 15km, to the small village of Periero.
At first glance, as we pulled into the motorhome parking area, there didn't seem to be anything nearby that would hold our attention for longer than a lunchstop. Then the map told me of a village just a few hundred metres walk away. By the time we'd whiled away the afternoon, variously wandering and sitting, we'd decided that we would stay over and take a stroll around the local PR walking route today.
We found the terrain near to the Spanish border to be formed of countless little lumps of hills, stretching out into the distance. Here we are at a higher altitude and the undulations are much longer and gentler. That didn't make the first part of our walk massively interesting. The land hereabouts isn't suitable for agriculture, or, well anything really. So, it's just a whole lot of stunted scrub clinging to those long, gentle undulations.
This pond was the first break in the monotony of the scrubland and I wondered whether it was going to be the most interesting thing we saw today.
A while later I spied what appeared to be the remains of either a hamlet or large farm in the distance. We later found ourselves over there and it was indeed completely abandoned.
Thing did improve. Whereas the routes we've walked to date have all been on tracks and dirt roads, this one suddenly took us off piste, for a climb out of a valley up a moderately-steep grassy slope:
There was either a failure of waymarking or a failure of attention (but we think the former), thus we missed a turn somewhere up that slope and found ourselves faced with a fence at the top. A quick hop over and a couple of minutes along the road and we were back on track ... and being snarled at by a rather aggressive dog, which was soon retrieved by its owner.
Waymarks were a bit lacking on the next section too, and it wasn't until we reached the bottom of this walled green lane that we found a marker confirming we had been right to go down it in the first place:
Thinking about it, missing or unobvious waymarks became a bit of a theme, as we missed a turn at the ruined farm/hamlet (see photo 2 above) too. That may have been a good thing, as we could see that the track beyond was being maintained by some heavy machinery, so probably best to keep out of their way. We got ourselves back on track at the next opportunity, and took a little detour to see if a nearby ruin was indeed an ex-windmill:
Yes, was the conclusion we reached.
View down to the village of Pereiro from the ruined windmill
We were soon down in the village having coffee outside of the one and only cafe there, in the company of the cafe's very handsome dog (pointer/dalmation cross was our uneducated guess; should have taken a photo).
Around 6.4 miles were walked with somewhere between 150-200m ascent.
At first glance, as we pulled into the motorhome parking area, there didn't seem to be anything nearby that would hold our attention for longer than a lunchstop. Then the map told me of a village just a few hundred metres walk away. By the time we'd whiled away the afternoon, variously wandering and sitting, we'd decided that we would stay over and take a stroll around the local PR walking route today.
We found the terrain near to the Spanish border to be formed of countless little lumps of hills, stretching out into the distance. Here we are at a higher altitude and the undulations are much longer and gentler. That didn't make the first part of our walk massively interesting. The land hereabouts isn't suitable for agriculture, or, well anything really. So, it's just a whole lot of stunted scrub clinging to those long, gentle undulations.
Thing did improve. Whereas the routes we've walked to date have all been on tracks and dirt roads, this one suddenly took us off piste, for a climb out of a valley up a moderately-steep grassy slope:
There was either a failure of waymarking or a failure of attention (but we think the former), thus we missed a turn somewhere up that slope and found ourselves faced with a fence at the top. A quick hop over and a couple of minutes along the road and we were back on track ... and being snarled at by a rather aggressive dog, which was soon retrieved by its owner.
Waymarks were a bit lacking on the next section too, and it wasn't until we reached the bottom of this walled green lane that we found a marker confirming we had been right to go down it in the first place:
Thinking about it, missing or unobvious waymarks became a bit of a theme, as we missed a turn at the ruined farm/hamlet (see photo 2 above) too. That may have been a good thing, as we could see that the track beyond was being maintained by some heavy machinery, so probably best to keep out of their way. We got ourselves back on track at the next opportunity, and took a little detour to see if a nearby ruin was indeed an ex-windmill:
We were soon down in the village having coffee outside of the one and only cafe there, in the company of the cafe's very handsome dog (pointer/dalmation cross was our uneducated guess; should have taken a photo).
Around 6.4 miles were walked with somewhere between 150-200m ascent.
Gayle, what hardware do you write your posts on?
ReplyDeleteI'm using a Samsung S5 Mini paired with a Tecknet bluetooth keyboard.
DeleteOk. Nothing out of the ordinary, so what software are you using to be able to write so much and put your images where you want them. I am having no luck with the blogger “new post” with my iPad or iPhone. I cannot get the page to scroll past page 1. So when I add images I have no idea what they are like until I have published and then I can’t edit them.
ReplyDeleteOn my desktop at home everything works a treat but out on the road I am struggling.
Until 18 January, when Google broke the photo-publishing interface with third party Apps, I was just using Bloggeroid for my posts. Since then, I've been typing the text in Bloggeroid, posting it, then editing in the Blogger Dashboard to add in the photos. The latter bit of the process is painful, as the Blogger Dashboard isn't user-friendly at the best of times, but is awful when used on a small mobile phone.
DeleteWe've got six more weeks left on this trip (blogging daily on my Bertie blog - that's a lot of frustration with the Blogger Dashboard still to come!) and assuming Google doesn't fix the interface issue before then, I'll be looking into other options once we get home as I can't be doing with the current process in the long term.
I’m sorry to read that but I’m glad it’s not only me who finds blogger on the go a bloody nightmare. Thanks Gayle for the info.
ReplyDelete