A Life Less Stationarity.
So yesterday was a huge landmark in all our lives, l taught my daughter to skip stones across the water so they bounce a few times before sinking! OK, it's ridiculous to call that a huge landmark, but then again is it? It's only eight years until she's an adult, how much we can miss of our children's lives of we let other people bring them up? And how much can they miss of their own lives if they spend six hours a day in a room with twenty-nine other kids writing stuff down for twelve years! I know many schools are very good and most teachers well-intentioned, but can we really call that a good education? What if they also spend their free time on screens? We are the generation replacing going and doing, with clicking and viewing. I'm not saying it's all bad, my daughter has become a fluent reader reading comics on YouTube in the absence of books in English! A wonderful future innovation! I guess I'm looking for balance. I'm trying to skip a stone across the surface of technology without sinking out of sight of the sunlight!
So there is also a narrative, we are travelling around Spain and Portugal in a campervan, to find adventure, experience, history, culture and a lot of sand! The last time I wrote in any detail we had made it to Santiago de Compostela and were staying in a hotel while broken down!
I'm now in a campsite in southern Portugal where we plan to sell the van and stay in a campsite but until spring. How did this happen? Well, we fixed the van in Santiago and set of South again in some of the worst weather we've seen in these parts, rain and flooding, rain on the roads coming from six directions! We got to Tui and stopped at the aire (free, camper only stop, which is basically a car park with a tap and a drain). The rain cleared and the kids and I took a walk.
Tui: I think Tui is my happy place! A perfect, tiny city, high on a hill with constant views of the wide blue river.
Porto: Porto is like London and Florence had a baby who got all the best features from both parents, add cable cars and trams too! It seems like a hundred thousand red roofs climb the hills from the river and no two the same shape!
Sao Mamede: We arrived in torrents of rain, everything was damp and our damp coats brought more wet into the van, keeping the door open was impossible, everyone huddled in the van on screens, everyone was freezing and board. I read it's a beautiful part of Portugal but the rain never let up and we left for more exhausting driving through minimal visibility. People we met were friendly and helpful, places were clean, if sometimes a bit scruffy from age, as I have found throughout Northern Spain and Portugal.
Fatima: Some point after Sao Mamede we broke down again, losing power on the long hills that characterize driving in Portugal (the big trucks frequently get down to 30 kilometres per hour!). A gentleman stopped to help us and ended up spending the whole day driving us around to garage and town, my son referred to him as a taxi! Fatima is odd, the whole town exists because some children had a vision of the Virgin Mary there. The pope has visited recently and the town is littered with statues of him, every shop sells statues of Mary and religious souvenirs, also wax body parts to bring the virgin as gifts if you require them healing! My daughter and I found wax hearts and intestinal tracts a bit macabre. If any of you would like me to bring you a wax spleen, say the word! There is no actual community there, just souvenir shops, hotels and churches!
All mankind has the right to celebrate their faith as they see fit, but personally, I felt real awe walking in the pilgrim's footsteps to the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela and Fatima left me unmoved.
The garage at Fatima said my van needed a new engine and it would cost five thousand euros! The people at my breakdown cover were not convinced and we agreed to ship it South to a garage recommended by a Facebook friend!
Vilamoura: we took the train to Vilamoura and the van got a piggyback on a breakdown truck! The van was picked up on a Tuesday in Fatima but did not join us in southern Portugal until Friday! No one knows what she did while of on her own, if she turns out to be pregnant there is a waiting list for the little campervan! We took the train, which was less than a hundred euros for a family of four to travel first class halfway down the country! The train station cafe was a dead ringer for 1977!
Vilamoura is beautiful but the old town is so manicured and populated by English and Germans that it is indistinguishable from the hotels and golf course! Tourism gone mad, visit Portugal and miss the whole culture.
We went from staying in the four seasons, with four swimming pools and a spa (on the breakdown insurance) to sleeping in the broken van on the garage four-court in lashing rain by a busy road when the breakdown insurance ran out! Seldom has such contract been part of my experience! But the same Facebook friend came and took us ice-skating in a glittering mall!
Quartarteira: The new quote was for a fuel pump was a thousand euros, but after the previous breakdown and way too much eating out because the freezing wet van was no fun, we didn't have it.
We patched the van up and drove it to a campsite in Quartarteira. It's along the beach from Vilamoura and joined together, like Brighton and Hove if there was fourteen miles of sandy beach and spiders the size of fifty pence pieces and the colour of the sun!
The lady at the campsite explained it to me like this, “Up that end they lie in the sun beside their villas, this end we work!” she chuckled quite cheerfully about that, clearly a woman who understands that no happiness has ever been found by doing nothing!
We arrived at the campsite, after two months on the road in a basic van, two breakdowns and a month of rain, every scrap of clothing was dirty, everyone was dirty, we were down to a handful of euros and dead tired.
We washed out clothing and bedding, charged our devices and made a plan, sell the van and rent a hut with a shower and flushing loo! Here we will stay until spring, no longer meandering around the coast visiting every village and bay, but it's beautiful here and we will explore and learn.
I've figured out the smart way to have come here, flights from the UK are very cheap and the campsite hut is six hundred euros the first month but only three thereafter. We could have flown Gatwick to Faro for about £50 each! (half an hour in a taxi each side) and rented a hut, skipped the rain, saved a fortune, never slept in a garage, never been boxed in, never arrived to sleep at an aire and found it shut, never broke down, never been tearful or lost and driving in circles.
But who wants to skip life, we would have never stood in improbably silent streets, awed by the vast churches, met heroes in nowhere places, chanced on stunning bridges and empty beaches! High fived at working out the toll booths! Inspired our friends and strangers met, tested our courage and communication skills. You don't want to skip over life, that's not an education!
Love Kirsteen
