Road Trip Portugal and Spain

Written by Dave:  There are some really interesting things you can see when on a road trip through Portugal and Spain.  We were making our way out of Spain and into Portugal for the first time.  Once we crossed the Guadiana River, we were in Portugal in the Algarve region.  It was beautiful, and interestingly the landscape really did change from what we had been passing through in Spain.  The dirt became red, like the dirt in Hawaii.  The vegetation started to change also.

One of the things we started seeing with more frequency were the storks.  I had never seen storks before, and at first thought that they might be pelicans.  A closer look revealed there was no pouch in the bill, and they were in fact storks.  There were nests everywhere on any high perch they could find.  It was fun to watch them glide up to their nests and see eager little heads pop up looking for something to eat.  We happened to be driving during 70km/hr sustained winds, and it was fascinating watching these large birds navigate the winds and land.

We then came upon forests of trees that were all black on the bottom.  We figured that there must have been a fire that came through and burned the bottoms of the trees.  The strange thing was, as we drove on for many miles, we continued to see the same thing on all the trees.  In Lisbon and Sintra, I saw lots of things made out of cork.  As we drove out of Lisbon and I saw more of the trees, I realized that they must be cork oak.  When I saw a pull off, I parked the camper and took a look.  They were cork trees, and the kids each took a sample of cork from the tree.  The dark bottoms of the trees were the area of the tree that the cork was harvested from.

Portugal also had really beautiful country roads.  They reminded us quite a bit of France with the beautiful tree lined roads.  As it is spring, the landscape was also colored beautifully by flowers.  The difficulty was getting a good picture from a moving camper.  Each time we spotted a beautiful field, something would obstruct the photo.  This photo Nancy was just able to capture before the trees blocked it.  We loved to see the fields of purple with splotches of yellow or red.  It looked like a paint pallet in some fields.  These red poppies were in full bloom everywhere, and were such a vibrant red.Once we drove back into Spain, we started seeing the big black bull on the hillsides again.  The bull was used to advertise Osborne Brandy de Jerez, but since roadside advertisement was banned within 150 meters of the road in 1994, many of the signs were taken down.  The people of Spain viewed the signs as a national treasure, so the signs were blacked out and allowed to remain.Of course you had many of the various Moorish castles scattered throughout the region.As we approached Barcelona, we were able to drive near Montserrat.  It was a striking mountain, and is Spain’s first national park.  It would have been fun to explore, but we were pushing on to France and you can’t see everything.The trip through Spain and Portugal went well, and we saw many interesting things.  When we finally camped just 3 kilometers short of France, it was good to get off the road for a while.  We will journey back into France soon, and we look forward to slowing down for several weeks in the French Riviera.