11th May CASTELO BRANCO

I slept really well and was woken by the dawn chorus; I was sitting outside the van, drinking coffee, by 6.30 a.m. watching the sun rise. It’s quite cool at 6.30 in the morning, so this is the time we will most likely need get up to do any strenuous chores – we can always have a siesta in the middle of the day.

We were rapidly running out of gas again, and this time we haven’t been able to find anyone to refill our (British) bottles. The gas bottles in Britain use a completely different regulator to the bottles in Portugal, so we thought we needed to buy a Portuguese regulator as well as the gas bottle; but of course nothing is ever that simple, for some reason our (British) regulator is built into the van which makes it impossible to fit the Portuguese regulator without cutting/disconnecting pipes and even then the locker, for the gas bottles, isn’t tall enough for the foreign bottles!!!! So today we bought ourselves an independent double burner stove, plus bottle and regulator (130€), this will ultimately go in our outside kitchen at Donkey Quinta (sorry, Fonte dos Clerigos) next to the barbeque and bread oven, it also means we’ll still have a cooker once we’ve sold the van.

Tonight we went out for a meal with a couple of blokes who are staying on the site long term (one has just bought a house that he’s doing up and the other one is a music producer who does the European trance festivals). Castelo Branco is not a touristy town so the restaurant we went to served traditional peasant style Portuguese food; between the four of us we had ........ 1 x soup, 4 x main meals, 4 x puddings, 8 x beers and 2 x coffees ............. the total bill came to 38€20, that’s less than £8 a head!!! The waiter was this lovely young boy who went off and translated the menu into English, he wrote everything down so that we could understand him – we left him a generous tip! Nick (the producer guy) was our driver; he drank two beers whilst constantly nipping outside to smoking dope; he drove us back to the campsite, in the dark, one handed whilst speaking on the phone! I don’t think we’ll take up his offer of a lift into town again!

Tomorrow we’re going back to the barragem for a couple of days, as nothing will happen here over the weekend, and we’ll come back here on Monday for our appointment with the solicitor.