On the Border

Monday
So after our second rest day, we took the train to Regua. This meant we skipped a few days of riding through (according to the lady in the tourist office) a lot of suburbia and not-so-nice stuff, and got us straight into the heart of vineyard country.

We caught the 9:15am train without any difficulty, even with our bikes. Once again, Lonely Planet is wrong in saying that you can't travel on trains in Portugal with bikes. We had a carriage virtually to ourselves and enjoyed the 2 hour ride.

We landed in Regua, which is a fairly large town on the banks of the Douro River. After having lunch there we got on our bikes and for the first time this trip, had a tailwind! We booted upriver for about 20km averaging more than 25km/h (often cruising over 30) and loved every minute of it.

Then we hit the turn-off to Sao João Da Pesqueira, which was where we were aiming for that arvo. The town was meant to be about 20km from the turnoff. So the road started climbing up, and up... and after 6km we had a break and thought we'd be near the end of it. But it kept climbing up, and up, and up... and after 10km we had another break. And anyway, we hit the top at 18km and had 2km of a short downhill to SJDP. We were knackered!

Anyway, gotta go and look for some accommodation in Spain. How exciting!

Write more soon,
love
m+j.