Spain and Beyond

Off to Portugal, via plane. We arrive at the aeropuerto early, and fly to Lisbon where Philippe from Portugal Nature Trails picks us up and takes us the scenic route to our hotel at Santiago do Cacem. Along the way he tells us about the cork trees and the pine nut trees. Portugal produces 50% of the world’s cork and they harvest the bark every 10 years – who knew? They document it by painting a large number on the tree so they know what year each tree was harvested. There are domestic pine nut trees and wild trees which look different; another interesting factoid.

Philippe gives us our bikes, helmets, maps, walks through the route, and leaves us with a phone for emergencies and we were on our own. It’s starting to get real!

As we adjust to Portugal life, we eat lunch for 5 Euros total, our cheapest yet. Lucky for us, this place has photos of their food on the menu. We tour the castle and walk around the cool little town. Later we go out to find dinner, but we find none. All places are closed, except one little mercado, and we pass it up in search of a larger one, less sketchy one. Unfortunately the larger one was closed and the small one is closed too by the time we got back to it. Uh oh.

We have no other choice but to ration our biking snacks for dinner, and we pluck some oranges off the orange trees on the streets. We are hoping we aren’t going to have to call Philippe to bail us out of jail on our new phone from him. Bring on the Vitamin C!

Every day on the bike tour we take an orange with us, I guess just for good luck, because we never eat it until we get to the place we are staying.