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Tuesday 21 February 2012

18th Feb CANGAS DE ONIS - A PORTENOVA(140ish miles)

TRAVELS WITH A SAT NAV!!!

We were woken up this morning by a chorus of dogs, their barks were echoing loudly around the car park. On looked out of the window; the area was full of cars with small trailers, with men were standing around in groups talking and the dogs were in the trailers (hence the echoing). They stayed around for nearly an hour and then all drove off. We can only guess what was happening; we think they were all gathering to go off boar hunting, or perhaps deer.

As mentioned previously we made the decision to travel around the coast of Spain to Portugal; one of the reasons for this was our (my) reluctance to negotiate narrow winding roads with deadly precipices on either side (i.e. I was frightened of driving over the mountains) – well I should have informed Mrs Sat Nav of this! Today she took us for a ‘short cut’; unfortunately once we realised where she was taking us there was nowhere to turn around so we had to negotiate 13 miles of “narrow winding roads ..........................” however, you can only be petrified for so long, and the scenery was absolutely amazing.


The sky was blue, the sun was out and in the end we actually appreciated the journey. It wasn’t much of a short cut though; it took us nearly an hour.

We thought the route to our chosen to the aire was quite straight forward (for about 100 miles), straight along the A8/E70, however parts of the motorway were new and Mrs Sat Nav didn’t recognise the way (she was convinced we were driving through fields) and spent most of the journey squawking “recalculating”, “prepare to make a U turn” or “turn  left”  - I took great satisfaction in turning her off!! We had our lunch (the elvers were very disappointing hardly any flavour to them, but the rest was good) overlooking a very pretty sandy cove.

The Sat Nav is really useful for the finish of a journey; it can navigate to specific coordinates quite accurately (as long as she’s set up correctly!). So we turned her on for the last part of our route, to the aire, and we obediently followed her command “turn left”;  driving over the foot bridge with the sign (which we roughly translated from Spanish once we were over) “vehicles forbidden except in emergencies”!!! Oh yes, and it did have a weight limit.

Now we’re parked in A Portenova a grim looking town, with a very eastern bloc feel to it. It’s full of high-rise buildings, a few shops and is rather grey.

We’re looking forward to tomorrow as we’re only travelling about 40 miles so we can do some exploring.

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