Saturday 2nd January

After a good nights sleep, woke up and decided we had had enough of the rain and wanted warmer weather, if not some sun. The north of Spain is very green, mainly due to the rain and we hadn’t exactly been grabbed by what we had seen so far. So decided we would head off to Portugal to the sea, hopefully better scenery and better weather. Also we would be back in Spain after Morocco, so could check more of it out then. Although it was far, decided if we both took turns driving we would be in Portugal some point tonight.

We had also in the last few days slowly come to the realisation of yet another problem! We had been doing a lot of driving through hilly bendy roads and realised liquid was leaking out of our Cassette toilet on to the shower room floor. We had had enough of cleaning it. So from now on we would empty before we drove until we found another motorhome shop along the way to get a replacement seal. I know the glamour just doesn’t stop!

So off we headed across north Spain. Now my impressions of Spain so far seem to be of a broken country in a way, that probably sounds harsher then I mean though. There seems to be lots of random abandoned buildings, new roads right by old roads, lots of new buildings, then space and then buildings. Just not much cohesion, but I suppose it’s a big Country and it’s cheaper building new. Anyway, we stopped at a town called Villada as the book said they had showers at their aire, this wasn’t the case, so we continued the journey into the dark and the night. Just before leaving Spain the road headed high into the hills and nearer the border we suddenly entered a town covered in snow! There was us thinking we were heading for warmer climates. We entered Portugal late on through hilly winding roads, and stopped at a town called Braganca below a castle. We decided then that we would stop driving at night as we were missing all the scenery. Oh and it was raining in Portugal too.