Spain – Day 6

Today we leave Fatima, Portugal and head to Salamonca, Spain which is about a 4 hour drive.  We had to take the same toll road back and this time the toll only cost me €2.50, talk about the difference a ticket in hand can make.  Pretty smooth drive all the way to the next hotel.  We made a quick stop at the Portugal-Spain border for some photo opps. Thanks to Rick Steves, I now know that once you are in Europe, crossing the borders are now the same as crossing state lines.  The only time you are asked for your passport is when you arrive from outside one of the 27 participating nations… or when you are checking into a hotel.

Met some wonderful folks from The UK while eating dinner around 10 pm.  They convinced us to head over to Mayor Square and check out the sites.  I was pleased to discover that in Spain, things don’t start up until 9 pm and last well into the morning.  We left mom at the hotel, grabbed the kids, found a taxi and headed over to Mayor Square.  The man I spoke with earlier was spot on.  This place was packed with people everywhere.  Most of them were college age as there is a university nearby.

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Spain and Portugal – day 4 and 5

The good thing about a GPS is that it can get you to where you want to go.  The bad thing about a GPS is the it doesn’t know when roads are blocked off and may not know how to find an alternate route.  What is worse is when you can see your hotel, but can’t find a way to get there.  For those who haven’t been to Spain or Portugal, here is another observation.  If you find flat land, I guarantee you will not find a city.  Cities here are always built on hill,  the better the city, the steeper the hill it is built on.

Fatima, in all its glory, is no different.  Hilly terrain with windy roads and no sense of pre-planning on the parts of the city engineers.  Much like a Russian astronaut with a hammer and a broken spaceship, I just kept hammering away until I achieved a desired route.  It only took me 15 minutes.  Most of which was spent waiting for people to cross the road or move their double parked car.  Man there are a lot of Spaniards over here today.

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