The Rest of the Trip...

The week that I got back from my Spain & Portugal break I had the best intentions of posting pictures right away. I blocked out a night to spend working on catching up on email and updating my blog. However, I got home and found out that our internet connection wasn’t working. Apparently someone had brought in an internet bill and it got mixed in with their mail from school and never made it to the bills to get paid pile next to our telephone… So I went with plan B and spent time organizing pictures & burning CDs for the three girls that went on the trip with me. Then last Saturday I moved (AGAIN) and Sunday I spent (besides church) unpacking, grocery shopping and cooking. Monday my friend Dan arrived to spend a few days and finally this past weekend I found time to get set up my internet connection at the new apartment only to discover that dial up internet doesn’t do so well uploading pictures! So, here I am on my lunch break at work finally sharing the rest of my trip…

Monte Gordo, Portugal
After our time in San Lucar we took off for Portugal. We took a bus to a border town in Spain and then found a taxi. Lisa had found pictures of a hotel in Monte Gordo, Portugal that looked inviting and the price was unbelievable, so when we got to the little beach town and had no idea where the hotel was, the taxi driver pulled up to a little restaurant along the beach and got directions and dropped us off at the hotel door with instructions on where to find the best bar in town. We passed on that suggestion! Our plan was to spend time relaxing in Portugal, and it turned out to be just the perfect town for that. It catered to tourists, so everyone spoke English, although we saw more Portuguese snowbirds than anyone else since we were there during off-season. It was great to take a break from our normally hectic schedules. I enjoyed spending some unhurried time in the Word. We also had some great seafood, rode bikes on trails in the woods, did a little shopping and spent some time on the beach.

We spent a couple of hours waiting at a bus station for a bus to Seville, and noticed that the front yard outside of the bus station was filled with orange trees. We assumed they were probably sour oranges, but were in the mood for some fruit so I went out and climbed one of the trees to reach some of the more ripe pieces of fruit. They were still a little tart, but not sour. So we picked a bag of oranges and ate them at various points throughout the rest of the trip.