Rasbro's Ramblings February 2015

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February has drifted by in a haze of gentle walking, Geocaching, birdwatching, tapas and reading. Mostly the weather has been mild and sunny with only one day of rain and a couple of very windy nights to disturb us. Just as well as we have had plenty of disturbed nights from barking dogs “barkathons” we call them. It is unfathomable how so many people simply ignore this racket every night. Now when we arrive at a campsite we sit and listen for a while to see what four legged critters are about although they often don’t make a sound until dark!

Geocaching has again been a highlight this month with us reaching our 1000^th cache. The ingenuity of cache hiders is a constant delight with caches hidden in all sorts of interesting places and items. One really cute cache was cleverly disguised as a bird nest complete with a clutch of eggs!

Birdwatching has been very rewarding with many dozens of Griffon Vultures in the mountainous areas; elegant Hoopoes in olive groves; and chattering groups of Iberian Magpies around campsites. No trip through the Cabo de Gato area is complete without a walk to the beach lake to see how many White Headed Ducks are around but this year they were a little thin on the ground so to speak as we saw only a lone youngster.

Two major town visits this month included Malaga and Cadiz both having interesting old town centres with lively atmospheres. We have tried to visit Cadiz on previous visits to Spain but got put off by the heavy traffic and difficult parking conditions but this time we discovered a nice campsite across the harbour in Puerta de Santa Maria which was only a 15 minute walk from a catamaran ferry. The trip across the bay of Cadiz was lovely and only took 30 minutes so we had plenty of time to stroll the old town, sample some tapas and soak up the Carnavale atmosphere before catching the late afternoon ferry back. Puerta de Santa Maria is also a nice town at one corner of the “sherry triangle”, the other two towns being Sanlucar de Barrameda and Jerez. We enjoyed a rather merry, sherry day around the town sampling various types and ages along with some excellent tapas in atmospheric bars. My favourite sherry is the Manzanilla from the Sanlucar area and a very nice bottle of it is slowly being consumed in our motorhome.

A quiet and pleasant area of Spain is the section just before Portugal where the village of Isla Cristina has a beautiful beach that would not look amiss on the Australian coastline. From here we hopped across the Rio Guadiano into Portugal to enjoy several, warm, sunny days on the Algarve coast. Once again we were pleasantly surprised to find some lovely new motorhome parking places opened over the past two years and they really do attract the motorhomes. We spent 3 days at a camper park behind the lovely beach of Falesia near Albufeira which was full every night. The place could hold about 60 vans but only had electric hook ups for half that so each morning came the post breakfast shuffle as some left, some moved and some more came in.



Well, since February is a short month, this blog is also a bit short but as I finish it we are about to turn our noses north to start exploring more of Portugal.

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