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Up hills and down dales in Porto

Heading further south, we landed in Porto for two nights. Our first foray into town saw us heading into a Fado show. Fado is a Portuguese traditional music style (that is also UNESCO listed), the music is known as fado a form of music characterized by mournful tunes and lyrics, often about the sea or…
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Exploring northern Portugal

For our first few days in northern Portugal, we based ourselves in the tiny seaside village of Caminha, for two reasons: If we are setting up the tent, it should be for more than one night When we packed down in Playa de la Arnia, it was raining hard and the tent needs some time…
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Travelling alongside the pilgrims
As we travel west from Playa de la Arnia, we have been following the Camino Santiago, well, we’ve really been seeing pilgrims from the Camino since just before San Sebastián. The Camino Santiago is one of the three top religious pilgrimages for Christians, which include Jerusalem and Rome. If you are doing the Camino correctly…
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Meeting the Red Terror and adventures around the Picos de Europa

Sunday we sadly moved on from lovely Orio, driving over to Bilbao to do the van/car swap over. The Red Terror is a manual left hand drive MG and startling in its difference to the van…. Poor Lesley was not coping with all the mod cons for some time! We have found another striking place…
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Ode to Orio
We limped Lesley’s poor van into Orio a few days ago and you’ve never seen two people more happy to make it to a campsite. What we didn’t realise at the time was was a cute place we had managed to land ourselves into. Orio is a small fishing village of just under 6,000 residents…
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Grazing through San Sebastián
Of San Sebastián, the late Anthony Bordain said “You could make the argument that there is no better place to eat in Europe than the city of San Sebastián”, so we made it our goal to munch our way around this gastronomic delight. There are apparently more Michelin hatted restaurants here than in any other…
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Two Girls and a Tampax
(Really it was sanitary pad)…… Well, if that title didn’t get you reading this blog, nothing will! As you may have guessed from my previous entry, we are having engine troubles. We stopped at an isolated hill top for a photo yesterday and could hear the coolant boiling, added to that, it was full of…
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Catalonia to the Basque Country
From Andorra we began winding our way across Catalonia to San Sebastián on the Bay of Biscay. the Pyrenees remained impressive for our drive. We wound our way through tiny hill top towns, always topped with a church, through fields of hay and grazing cattle and deep ravines where roaring water pushed through sheer rock…
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Sleeping to the sound of cow bells, Andorra Explorer
Last night we stayed in the capital of Andorra, Andorra da La Vella. It really gives an odd first impression of the country. It’s all very newly built, there are loads of prestige car dealers, high end investment banks, brand shopping and difficult parking (which is not good when you are in a 2.3m tall…
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Montserrat to Andorra, pilgrims and tax havens
Monday morning started with some life admin for the van, the AdBlue light had come up on the dash and we needed to get some coolant, of course these things combined well with coffee and breakfast, so by late morning we were on the road again. It’s a short drive from Barcelona to Montserrat, winding…
