Again, we are up early and quickly into our morning routine of getting clean and packing the van away. No, I am not going into the detail of that process because, dear reader, if you don’t know how to get clean and tidy your room, you may be a bit young to be reading this. We are high up in Spain and the clouds are low, so it is nicely cool after the long hot drive through France.
Today’s route doesn’t take us to any major cities and the roads are exceptionally light with traffic. It leaves us loads of time to just chat about dream stuff and travelling. What we are looking forward to, and what we hope might happen. It is our favourite bit of the journey when we just dream big. The bigger the better. The dreams keep evolving. When you are hard at work in a job your dream might be two weeks holiday somewhere nice. I know that was one of mine in the past. Now I dream of six weeks going round Portugal. I dream of having my own bit of land. I dream of a dream home with Kimberley. Mostly I dream of having a little red tractor or a quad bike or both!!
Spain flashes by and we are discussing the best way to record us going into Portugal. I mean you can only go into Portugal for the first time once. We decide to find somewhere on the Spanish side of the border to stop and have a coffee. Then we are going to cross into Portugal and have another coffee there. We are silly excited. Laughing and singing and giggling and we are going to beat our 48-hour deadline by about 45 minutes. But we stop a couple of times for toilet breaks which uses up valuable time and because I am a little tired, we decide not to stop in Spain. The place Kimberley has found for us to stop on the Spanish side of the border is called Tui. I kid you not. A Spanish village dedicated to bringing you the best packaged holidays!
After much discussion and without understanding why, we decide to leave the autoroute and drive through Tui to see what we will be missing. Not too much apparently. The satnav takes us through Tui and on to the old bridge into Portugal. This bridge is absolutely beautiful as it is a box bridge that used to have the railway line going over the top of it. It takes us right into the fortress town of Valenca. We have no idea it was there until this moment. I love the power of the Universe.
We are in Portugal. We whoop at each other as we drive over the bridge. This moment has been five months in the making and we could never have planned a more perfect way to make our entrance into our future life. It is perfect.
A mere seventeen minutes later, we are sitting at a café table in the main square, inside the fortress walls, eating our very first Pastel de Natas and drinking beautiful coffee. We truly could not be happier as we sit there listening to a fantastic guitarist entertain all within earshot. We love café life.
