Tuesday 12th January

Today we decided to head for the town of Colvilha and hopefully collect our parcels, one of them being a repaired Tom Tom, in the fog and rain. We arrived in heavy rain and parked up and headed off on foot to find the post office. Well we found a hard job finding the centre let alone the post office and couldn’t even find a street map on any of the roads. After a while and now very wet we finally came across the post office. After queuing up I asked in Portuguese if there was any post for me, after a look around I was told there wasn’t, so off we headed towards the door. Lorna then found a book with all the postal town numbers in, as this was key for posting to Portugal’s Poste Restante. We discovered that the post town number we had been given further north in Portugal was in fact incorrect and for another town near by here! At this point one of the staff came across who spoke a little English and we explained that we had the town on the address, but the post number was incorrect. She explained that the number was more important than the name and would probably be sent to Guarda, the town the number was for. So off we headed for Guarda 40km down the road. We arrived in Guarda and had fun driving around small town streets. Until we found some parking a little out and walked into the centre, again in the rain. Again we couldn’t find the post office or the tourist information centre, no signs or town maps and again we were getting very wet. After a second walk around the same streets we came across a small sign for the tourist office. Then found out where the post office was and was also told the ski station was again open, but the roads to it were closed! So to the post office and after my line from our phrase book asking whether there was any post for me, I was told no. So we would be spending a night here, with the hope it would be here tomorrow. After driving around a fair bit we finally came across the motorhome stop, well car park, featured in our book.