Days 16 & 17 – to Entre Ambos os Rios

I decided to top up the LPG, which I only use for cooking, at Arcos de Valdevez, to the south west, about a half hour drive.

There’s a website that shows the LPG stockists. In some countries, Scandinavia for example, they can be very rare, but here in Spain and Portugal they are very common. Quite a few vehicles run on the fuel, so much that it is referred to as Autogas.

My tank is only 15 litres, and that will last me for at least 12 weeks. I had filled up, or attempted to, in Penrith, but it was a cold day, and to get anything into the tank on a cold day is almost impossible.

The tank will only ever fill to about 75%, and the gauge is quite inaccurate, so just as well to top it up. I got 4 litres in before the pump slows to a crawl, delivering a litre every few minutes. That indicates that it is almost, but not quite full. I got 5 and a half litres in the end, which should be plenty.

After as supermarket stock up, I headed for the campsite, called Lima Escape, just inside the National Park, near to the town of Entre Ambos os Rios. It seems we will be without sun this week, so I want to top the batteries up, and take an indoor shower..

The site is perfect at this time of year, though I dread to think what it would be like in the season. There was just one other person staying, a German woman with her self-build Ducato and her two dogs.

It rained on and off for most of the day, showers merging as it were. Though it was possible to get out for an hour or two, it was the chance to do a few van chores and catch up on some reading.

Tuesday was forecast for even more rain than Monday, though it really didn’t materialise.

There is a circuit from the Cicerone book I wanted to do that can be started from the campsite which we did in the morning.

After lunch I got chatting to the German woman, who works full time running her own business from her van. She took on the circuit I had just done, having worked all morning, and in the early evening we went to the bar here at the site for a couple of beers.

By then there were two other vans staying, and all of us were in the bar, so it was quite social; a couple from Portugal, and a couple from Germany.