Where are Ron and Ellen?
Portugal (Ron and Ellen), Southeastern Africa (Ron), 19 September 2013 - 13 January 2014
Ron and Ellen in Porto, Portugal, October 2013
Tomar and Evora, Portugal
To see photos of Tomar and Batalha, click on the thumbnail at the left.
Rain and rain
To see photos of Evora, click on the thumbnail at the left.
2 October 2013
Evora, PortugalDear Family and Friends,
We left Lisbon with our rental car, a deisel Ford Fiesta (deisel fuel being cheaper here than regular gasoline), at a bit after 1 pm on Saturday 28 September. For the same price, we were offered the choice between the Ford and something slightly larger, and are very happy we chose the smaller car, since we've had to drive and park in some very tight places. One road in Tomar had a sign indicating it had a spot that was 2 metres wide, but we made it through - carefully. Leaving Lisbon we only made one error, missing the entrance to the freeway, but were able to recover from that in only a few minutes. Then it was mostly freeway and toll road (expensive but beautifully maintained toll road) most of the way to Tomar.
With Ron driving and Ellen navigating, we made it without further difficulty to the tourist office in Tomar, where we left the car while we walked to look at three possible hotel options. The one we chose, Residencial Uniao, had a big bedroom, a huge common room with big upholstered chairs and couches, and a lovely breakfast room with lots of glass looking into the patio. Although it was cloudy and threatening rain, we were able to wander around the old town center, which is quite lovely, with a big river and a park on either side, and have dinner (shrimp curry for Ellen, roast pork with pineapple for Ron) before getting rained on as we walked back to our hotel. It poured during the night. On Sunday, armed with jackets and umbrella, we walked in the slight drizzle up the steep hill to the Convento de Cristo, headquarters of the Knights Templar, who held enormous power in Portugal from the 12th to 16th centuries. They played a key role in expelling the Moors from Portugal, and were major financers allowing Prince Henry the Navigator to fund all his voyages of discovery (like Vasco da Gama) in the 1400s. It is a huge complex, set inside 12th century walls, with multiple courtyards, living and working areas, chapels, storage areas, cloisters, stables - on and on and on. The huge Templar church has a circular design, supposedly so that the knights could attend mass on horseback! By the time we finished our several hours of exploring the place, it had moved from drizzle to light rain. We had a picnic lunch in our room, then set out in the car to explore a wider area.
We went first to Batalha, another monastery with a gigantic Gothic church, with ornate spires and towers. The we drove through a large park area, the kind of thing we would call a nature reserve or maybe like some of the national forest areas in the US, with tiny towns, but lots of wild area, and ended up in Peniche, a beach resort town on a peninsula jutting out into the Atlantic. We drove the ring road along the edge of the rocky cliffs, with Ron leaping out into the rain to take occasional photos. Luckily it wasn't too foggy and we had good views! We asked some locals for recommendations for a good seafood restaurant, and had a wonderful dinner (grilled salmon, grilled sea bass) overlooking a rainy harbor. Then home in the dark and the rain, missing our turn off the freeway and making a couple of other mistakes - but we got there eventually.
Monday it was raining steadily, so we spent a good bit of the day hanging out and reading in the big chairs in the hotel common room. Late afternoon it was only drizzling, so we went out for tea and walked around for a bit. We'd already picked out our dinner restaurant, where we had one of the menu items for two people, rice with fish and shellfish. We'd expected a seafood risotto, but it was much soupier that risotto - but was really good, with pieces of some kind of large fish, big shrimp, tiny shrimp, and tiny mussels in it.
We had planned to go further north to Porto on Tuesday, but the weather forecast was for continued rain in the north into Thursday, so we looked at the weather to the south and discovered that in Evora it was rainy on Tuesday, but then clearing, so we came to Evora. It is a medieval town within walls, lots of tiny winding streets and hilly. It has prehistoric megaliths in the area outside it, the biggest ones on the Iberian Peninsula. So today, with the rain finally ended and the sun in and out of the clouds, we drove out into the country, passing fields of cork trees, to a huge oval of standing stones which are about 7,000 years old - predating Stonehenge. They are just sitting out there on a slope in the middle of the cork trees, and you can wander around and through them, and it gives you goose bumps thinking about people working to put them up so long ago.
The cork trees are interesting. They cut the outer bark off the bottom part of the tree, something that would kill most trees but obviously doesn´t kill the cork trees. Most of them have a number painted on the trunk indicating when they were harvested, e.g. a 7 for 2007, a 3 for the ones harvested this year. The trees have to be at least 25 years old before being harvested, and are only harvested every 9 years. When treated carefully, a tree can produce cork for 200 years.
Tomorrow we are finally headed for Porto - the next week is supposed to be good weather in the north, and have rented an apartment there for four nights. It will be about a 5 hour drive from here, pretty much all on the (expensive) toll roads.
Love to all,
Ellen and Ron
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Last updated: 31 October 2013
