To the barragem and back...

It rained heavily in the night, but was brighter with the odd downpour during the day. We explored the town, walking up to the castle. Along the way we saw rice paddy fields, herons, stalks, huge cactus hedges and a community clothes washing area! Luckily we also found the local library which had internet access, so it was good to be able to catch up with emails, research and blog updating.
Thanks everyone for all your emails and messages, please keep them coming :-)


Later in the afternoon we invited our new friends over for a cuppa. For the first time we opened the habitation door (the door into the living area). Up until then we'd used the space by the door as a bit of a storage area, but thought we'd better be civilised and tidy up as we had visitors! Dennis and Kath gave us advice about a problem we have with our satellite dish and as a result Mark is going to try and get up on the roof and adjust the LNB tomorrow.

The next day (Sunday) is misty and quite cold early on, but by mid morning it was a lovely sunny day. Dennis and Kath popped over to say goodbye, we left soon after and go to a nearby barragem (dam) that they’d told us about. We went via the local supermarket then headed out into the country and arrived at the dam mid afternoon, by now the weather had turned a bit gloomy. There were quite a few motorhomes parked up, apparently some live at the dam all year round. There’s a restaurant and shower/toiler and water facilities (we took one look at the showers/toilets and quickly decided to keep using our own facilities!)

As we’d removed the ladder off the back of the motorhome to allow us to fit our bike rack, we had to be inventive and find a way for Mark to get on the roof. So we drove up alongside a large recycling bin and he climbed up using that. So with me in the motorhome watching the screen, Mark adjusted the LNB on the satellite dish. Due to moving so far south, the LNB needed to be moved by around 30 degrees. For the last couple of weeks we’ve only been able to receive a very small amount of TV channels (such as BBC News, Sky News, CNN, S4C, Radio 2 and 4 and BBC Parliament!!) So we were keen to do whatever we could to try and get more lighthearted entertainment. However we need to persevere and try again tomorrow. It appears that our dish may be a tad too small to pick up the channels we want whilst in Portugal and Southern Spain.