Our 2011 Portuguese trip


We began with the best excuse I’ve ever heard for a course of a meal taking too long to arrive.  We’d ordered the ‘Selection of Desserts to share’.  “Will it be much longer ?”  “Sorry, the manager has had to go out to get another blow torch for your crème brulee.”   This was in exotic Wimborne Minster where we’d decided to start the trip with lunch before catching the Santander ferry from Portsmouth.  The dessert selection was excellent when it arrived, but there was no crème brulee.

Last time we went to Spain it was a P & O ferry and it was crap, like a floating motorway service station and not even a good one of those.  This time we went Brittany Ferries and it was far superior, good food, reasonable prices and not crowded.  Smooth, smooth crossing.


First site in Portugal, terraced, almost empty, facing west and covered in cherry trees so we can pick ripe cherries any time we want.  They’re small, about the size of a little fingernail, but sweet.   Plus the first cuckoo we’ve heard this year.



are currently meandering in a southerly direction close to the Spanish border, a sparely populated, empty, untouristy area.  Very attractive countryside, dominated here by dehesa, which is a system of wooded pasture consisting of well spaced cork oaks with meadow beneath.  Fantastic for the wildlife, both birds and flowers.  Like everything else a landscape under threat because the use of plastic and metal wine stoppers means that cork oaks become a less commercial proposition. So to play your part in helping to save this fragile and important eco-system I have to ask you to drink a lot more wine from bottlles using real corks.

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