Fifty-Three Kilometres and a New Dent

The night

The night was terrible. My hips hurt in a way I had not budgeted for, and it took until roughly half three to find the one position that didn’t, at which point I slept beautifully for what was left.

Eight hundred kilometres of sitting still will do that, apparently. Nobody mentions the hips.

The accommodation

The hotel was booked from the roadside, somewhere in the window between deciding on Fuseta and admitting I wasn’t going to make Fuseta. The alternative was one of the motorway hostals. I still don’t know which of us made the better call.

It looked fine on arrival. There were, of course, no private parking spaces, despite private parking spaces being the thing the listing was proudest of. So I parked on the street, and during the night Roach was introduced to the rear end of a small transport van.

Romantic, in its way.

The place itself was — fine? For the price, fine enough. The beds were not comfortable, and I say that as someone who has spent months sleeping on a cheap IKEA sofa bed and considered it a lifestyle.

The town

Vila Real de Santo António is a small Portuguese border town, with Spain close enough to be an argument.

Quiet, peaceful, nothing obviously remarkable beyond its own history and its geography.

One evening in, I don’t yet understand where the tourist crowd and the industry behind it come from. I assume there’s a reason. I assume I’ll find it over the next couple of months.

The last hour to Olhão

This stage was the easy one. Olhão turned out to be about an hour away, so I took my time. Packed up, loaded Roach, checked out, and produced roughly half a day’s worth of sweat doing it.

Country roads this time, since it was short and for once I had the hours to spare.

Which was worth doing, because it’s the only way to see how people actually drive here, rather than how they drive on a motorway. It’s different. More chaotic in places. Also more careful, since most of these roads need work and everyone using them knows it.

So I arrived in Olhão at a late morning, hugged Claire from Pomar Coliving, and slid straight back into the day-to-day.