On to Portugal....After a relaxing weekend in La Coruna and a few nights of home cooking on the boat, we headed round the coast to Bayona for Halloween. We celebrated with our Pumpkin candle and our horror glow in the dark finger puppets, obviously our minds were a little warped as we decided to eat pizza in Spain, did we think the Spanish had a big Italian tourist market to impress?? Obviously not, the base was like a digestive biscuit and I struggled to eat one piece. So we rounded up that night having a second attempt at dinner in a tapas bar.
The following day, Matt and I took a walk round the castle and admired the beautiful views and the magnificent weather, it really was something else and it gives me, and I'm sure the rest of the crew, a great feeling to know that we've sailed all this way and everything is just getting better and better. However just to be safe we ate in the same Tapas restuarant later that night.
6AM the following morning was the wake up call for myself, Matt and Ali, and a get up of 7am was managed and we pushed off the dock at 7.30AM. We followed the coast of Spain for 20 miles admiring the mountains, and reached Portuguese waters at around 11am, changing our courtesy flag over quickly. The coast of Portugal was a lot flatter and the coast line contained a concrete city in the horizon, which wasn't what we were looking out for, we were heading for chemical city and it wasn't long before the chimneys and bellowing smoke arose from the horizon. Our destination being the Port Leixoes, and the town Leca de Palmeira.
We read our cruising guide book to learn that the Marina was a stink pot and that a rat had been spotted floating in the water 2 years ago, Suzannah was later able to confirm that he was still cruising the Marina's waters......All this aside the facilities are good and the bar does good breakfast snacks and speak good English. Something we are lacking is a Portuguese speaker but Suzannah is managing to get us by with her extremely fluent Spanish, enabling us to eat these last few days. We're certainly all learning alot as we pass from town to town. Yesterday, Saturday, we ventured by bus to Porto, Home of the Port Cellars. How excited were we as we raced through the town down to the waterfront stopping for a quick sharpener before we crossed the bridge leading to Heaven..... We headed straight for Sandermanns only to learn they were closed on a weekend, we began to wonder if we were on our way to Hell. However, all was not lost as we saw other tourists with bags full of bottles. We headed up an extremely steep hill and stumbled across Gonzalez's Cellar, we were in for the kill as the tour was not running so we had to get straight into the tasting. We tried both a sweet and a dry White Port, then followed it with a medium red, then on to the special reserve - WOW, followed by their millenium reserve +40 1902!!! and then by a brandy made from Port Wine, our taste buds were certainly tickled!!! We were then informed that they were closing in an hour so a few bottles were rapidly purchased as the bartender explained the story of the Portuguese Chicken, and then gave us 6 clay finger size models of it.
We were then on a quick dash down the road where Offley's was still open and we went in there for a tour of their cellars, which contained millions of litres of the fine red liquid stored in oak barrels of upto 100 years old. With the mysteries of Port making finally solved we tried a few samples to finish our day in Porto. However, with plenty of Port Houses stiil to visit rumours are afoot that we might return again on Monday!!!
Portugal is definately very different from Spain, we managed our cheapest round of drinks yet, 6 beers for £3!!! Certainly can't complain about that!!
Mr G seems to have been causing a stir back in the UK and on the boat, after a very traumatising week, of falling down the hatch and hitting me in the galley, then winding up in the cook pot,we were all surprised when he showed his first sprouts of growth, he is now being watched a lot more closely and is showing rapid growth on a daily basis, even though he was found with a water bottle on top of him recently. Pictures are to follow but we are just waiting to finish the film.
Revised -- Sunday 4 November 2001
Continue to Week 4
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