On and off...

Late start today, slept in because....  We wanted to!  As we were leaving the counter man (see previous post) confronted us regarding payment for the room.  We began by insisting with hand gestures and broken Portuglish that we had already squared out tab, and he insisted otherwise.  We then rechecked the booking he saw it was a registration, not a payment, and laid three tens on the counter, which he accepted, and we departed.

Nataliia and I were in 🇧🇬 Bulgaria last year and during the course of our two-week visit we drove a rental car through countless partially abandoned, and often fully abandoned villages. Houses on either side of the road in various states of disrepair, roofs caving in, stone and brick walls breaking away, unable to resist the combination of neglect and time.

We've begun to notice something similar, but not quite the same in Portugal. We walk through Villages where we see houses that have been long abandoned, with collapsing roofs animals that are barely standing. But right next to those we find brand new homes that must have cost, even in the local economy, many tens of thousands of Euros to construct. They have Land Rovers and Mercedes parked in the driveway, well-manicured gardens bursting with flowers and healthy vegetables, and all signs of being inhabited. Right next door to these brand new dwellings, often sharing a common wall, is a house in ruinous disrepair with a tree growing up through the roof and rotted boards in place of windows and doors.

The development practices of the Portuguese are at the present time a mystery.

We have been dividing our days up into three legs. The first leg is from the hotel 8 to 10 kilometers to a first stop where we have coffee and a light breakfast. We then go 8 to 10 more km and stop for lunch and then continue on to the albergue a or hostel where we will spend the night. I started the day on the bicycle but trade it off with my son after breakfast. When we met him up for lunch he said he didn't like it and wanted to go back to walking since he had spent most of his time pushing the bicycle uphill anyway. A great deal of today's travel had been up steep hills, and it probably wasn't the best day for him to have taken the bike. We will try again in the future I am sure.