Where's Bertie? He's still sitting exactly where he was yesterday at Alcoutim.
Weather: Wall-to-wall sunshine and nice and warm.
There's a stray dog that lives in this parking area. There's another that must live nearby and often wanders through. They're both little terrier things, whilst we saw quite a bit of them yesterday, we heard not a peep from either. That all changed after dark, when the barking started ... and went on and on and on.
At one point I suggested that we could backtrack to our previous night spot, where we would be guaranteed a quiet night, but we stuck it out, which proved to be the right decision. At around 9.30 they finally settled down and a quiet night was had.
(Quick digression: As I type this the church bells in Alcoutim are chiming 5pm at the exact same time as the bells over the river are chiming 6pm - rendering both of them pointless, from this position at least, as you couldn't count one set of chimes if you tried. The Spanish chime repeats a minute later, which is useful - as long as you know it's in Spain.)
Today a 10km walk to the north of Alcoutim filled our morning nicely, and on our way back we would have stopped for lunch at the grill on the riverside, except their menu doesn't currently involve anything that's not meat, which ruled it out for me.
So, lunch was sandwiches made with jaw-breaking bread (the local bread is a rustic affair, which is tasty, but doesn't half have a tough crust). By the time we had finished that, all of Bertie's 7 neighbours from last night had left and he was all on his lonesome.
A German couple has since arrived in a caravan. I've no idea what the legality is in Portugal of parking a caravan up in place like this, but we have no objection to them being here. Aside from anything else, they've provided some fine entertainment this afternoon. How anyone can possibly spend so long faffing around with positioning and setting up, only then to decide to reverse the process and start all over again a few feet to the side is beyond me. I sometimes feel that we go to extremes to try to find the most level spot, but I doubt that we ever shunt back and forth for more than a minute. Even in places where it's appropriate to deploy levelling ramps the process doesn't take more than a few minutes. So, two hours spent positioning and fine tuning did seem beyond excessive, even if fun to watch (particularly the drama when the positioning of a wheel chock went awry).
Our other entertainment of the afternoon was a look around an exhibition of the work of a local artist at the library, which was well worth popping in to see. Maybe it would also have been worth going into the castle and taking a look at the museum there, but we couldn't find the enthusiasm for that today.
Weather: Wall-to-wall sunshine and nice and warm.
There's a stray dog that lives in this parking area. There's another that must live nearby and often wanders through. They're both little terrier things, whilst we saw quite a bit of them yesterday, we heard not a peep from either. That all changed after dark, when the barking started ... and went on and on and on.
At one point I suggested that we could backtrack to our previous night spot, where we would be guaranteed a quiet night, but we stuck it out, which proved to be the right decision. At around 9.30 they finally settled down and a quiet night was had.
(Quick digression: As I type this the church bells in Alcoutim are chiming 5pm at the exact same time as the bells over the river are chiming 6pm - rendering both of them pointless, from this position at least, as you couldn't count one set of chimes if you tried. The Spanish chime repeats a minute later, which is useful - as long as you know it's in Spain.)
Today a 10km walk to the north of Alcoutim filled our morning nicely, and on our way back we would have stopped for lunch at the grill on the riverside, except their menu doesn't currently involve anything that's not meat, which ruled it out for me.
So, lunch was sandwiches made with jaw-breaking bread (the local bread is a rustic affair, which is tasty, but doesn't half have a tough crust). By the time we had finished that, all of Bertie's 7 neighbours from last night had left and he was all on his lonesome.
A German couple has since arrived in a caravan. I've no idea what the legality is in Portugal of parking a caravan up in place like this, but we have no objection to them being here. Aside from anything else, they've provided some fine entertainment this afternoon. How anyone can possibly spend so long faffing around with positioning and setting up, only then to decide to reverse the process and start all over again a few feet to the side is beyond me. I sometimes feel that we go to extremes to try to find the most level spot, but I doubt that we ever shunt back and forth for more than a minute. Even in places where it's appropriate to deploy levelling ramps the process doesn't take more than a few minutes. So, two hours spent positioning and fine tuning did seem beyond excessive, even if fun to watch (particularly the drama when the positioning of a wheel chock went awry).
Our other entertainment of the afternoon was a look around an exhibition of the work of a local artist at the library, which was well worth popping in to see. Maybe it would also have been worth going into the castle and taking a look at the museum there, but we couldn't find the enthusiasm for that today.
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