Explore europe in a campervan

Our good friends Jenny and Paul are flying to Faro on the 5th of June to stay with us for a week. So that didn’t leave us many days to drive from Tarifa to Faro in Portugal, clean the van and check out what campsite we will stay at for our holiday in Portugal. We call it our holiday even though I suppose its not, but when we have visitors it’s the only time we stay a week on a campsite, go out for meals and drink more; so its more like a holiday.

The journey to Portugal was pretty uneventful and we managed it easily in just a few hours. We searched for our first wild camping spot with some apprehension as we’ve heard mixed reviews of Portugal. Thanks to the sat-nav we ended up at a quiet looking spot in Tavira (Faro). There were about 4 other motorhomes there and that’s a good enough sign to us that motorhomes are tolerated. We spoke to an English couple with a German registered motorhome and they assured us that free parking in Portugal was easy and they have been doing it for years.

We were awoken about 9 in the morning by lots of noise in the factory behind so we didn’t hang around, we had breakfast and we were off. We spent most of the day checking out about 3 campsites in the Albufeira area. The one we have decided on is huge, with 3 pools and it has a bus stop outside that goes into the town.

Tryng to find somewhere to wild camp was pretty difficult, we ended up staying in a beach car park with no other motorhomes. There was even a sign saying no motorhomes but the car park was huge so we just spent the night in one corner.

We spent the next day in the car park cleaning the van and doing some reading. We didn’t attempt to move on from that spot until 8pm. We drove down the coast and lucky, within 30 minutes we spotted a few motorhomes parked down by the beach. It was a great spot, there were at least 10 other motorhomes and the spot was right on the beach. Turuned out the couple we spoke to on our first night in Portugal were parked right in front of us!

I’m sat here now writing this blog at 14:00, the sun is blazing outside and it seems like the baking hot weather is finally here. Jenny and Paul land in 3 hours for their week’s holiday. So we’ll have to get a move on.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 at 12:36 pm and is filed under Diary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.