Aljucén, Spain

 Friday 23/09/22

Bokkie has said 'até breve' to Portugal and 'bienvenido' to Spain, although it wasn't the best of starts this morning.

Until next time...

Crossing into Espana

On the way back from our beach trip on Tuesday, we popped into a filling station to fill Bokkie up for the long trip.  I was even explaining to Charmaine how petrol and diesel are called gasolina and gasolea respectively, so are very easy to mix up if you aren't careful (which we usually are).  

This morning, when I started Bokkie so that we could take Charmaine to the airport, she burped and farted plumes of black smoke - what was going on?  She had been fine on the way back, now suddenly there was something dramatically wrong.  I thought maybe the fuel was contaminated with water so ran some out of the diesel filter and from the smell I could tell I had fallen into the gasolina trap!  I had put 47 litres of petrol into Bokkie's tank, not diesel 😒.

A quick planning session later we had an Uber booked for Charmaine and contacted the European breakdown company to see if they could help.  Miguel, the Uber driver, whisked Charmaine safely to Faro for her flight at mid-day, and a local mechanic turned up in a van with empty containers and a pump to give Bokkie a stomach pump.  He was confident he could sort her out and about an hour later and quite a few Euros lighter, she was running again, thank heavens!

Parts of the area in Spain is very dry...

... and parts are surprisingly fertile

We had already cancelled our plans to travel into Seville; the heat and the prospect of a crowded Friday afternoon put us off, so we drove around the city and turned north.  We had a few possible stops lined up but managed to miss the first one (finger trouble on the iPad) and didn't really like the look of the second, in an industrial looking town.  

The third stop is luckily fantastic as it was getting quite late in the day (around  8pm Spanish time) when we finally arrived.  It's a perfect little aire on the edge of a small town and we were treated to a magnificent sunset upon arrival.  The perfect end to a long, hot and eventful day.

The town has gone to so much effort for the aire, it's lovely!

Not a bad view for the night.

A quick supper, walk around town and we're ready for bed.  We think we'll take our time tomorrow morning.  We're missing having Charmaine with us and it was lovely spending some quality time with her - she is now safely back in a rainy and cold England!

It's a small town but everything is beautifully looked after, with a lovely church

Day tripping from Albufeira

 Tuesday 20/09/22

We collected Charmaine from Faro airport almost a week ago and have been enjoying our time in Albufeira, getting in lots of walking, cycling and swimming.

It's been lovely to spend some family time together in the sun

We have been extremely lucky with the weather, not too hot, but warm enough to swim in the pool almost every day in spite of the odd rain shower.  We've walked into Albufeira a couple of times as well,  so decided to take Bokkie out for a short run today.

We headed to Praia da Marinha, near to Benagil.  We had read that there are some wonderfully scenic cliff walks, secluded beaches and pit caves - and it didn't disappoint!  The views were stunning, reminding us of some of the national parks we visited in the US some years back.  The sea was as calm as a board and we watched a few kayakers exploring the wonderful scenery from the water.

Kayakers enjoying the scenery

We headed back to Bokkie to get into our swimming costumes and head for a swim only to be thwarted by the local police; we'd unfortunately missed the no-motorhome sign and weren't allowed to be in the area.  As we had been lucky to have gotten away with a cheeky walk already, we apologised and headed back to camp.  It was a bit disappointing but luckily we could still get our swim in at the camp pool.

One of the many pit-caves, open to the sea below

We're still here until Friday and then head off - Charmaine flying back to the UK and us driving through Spain and France to catch the ferry from Caen.  We then have a few UK house-sits to take us through to the end of the year, after which we hope to continue travelling.

Bracing for Danielle at Albufeira

 Monday 12/09/22

As I write this, the first few raindrops have begun to fall on Bokkie's roof.  We've packed away the awning and chairs and wrapped up the bikes in anticipation of a fairly long rainy spell.  

Portugal is very dry at the moment so hopefully they get some good rainfall without any damage.  As usual, the press have created quite a lot of hype over the approaching typhoon, Danielle, which was headed to the UK but changed course to Portugal when it heard Charmaine was coming to visit us.  Typical Micklem luck! 😆

Holiday flats on every available inch of space

Compare this photo to our last visit in 2019 winter.
Albufeira Feb 2019

We've been making the best of the good weather over the past few days, exploring the area and settling into camp life.  This is a very noisy, bustling camp with loud music events every night which isn't our normal type of site but we're leaning into it.  The Portuguese schools reopen this week so there was a final flurry of partying on Friday and Saturday followed by a mass-exodus yesterday with a few die-hards leaving today. 

It's great fun watching all the goings-on in the camp, and seeing what people get up to - we even had the police in the camp yesterday. Looks like some youngsters got up to no-good in Albufeira town the previous evening!

Things are already pretty good, but so is the coffee.

Sand Art

The approaching storm didn't stop the beach-goers.

Our campsite is absolutely huge (with a large pool, restaurant, 2 bars and even a hairdresser), so it suddenly looks quite empty but we have already noticed the next wave of travellers arriving.  

We're really enjoying it here so hope the weather doesn't put too much of a dampener on things as we're looking forward to showing Charmaine a bit of camp-life for a week or so.

Ultra-competitive Toni, taking the lead.

Camping at Albufeira

 Friday 09/09/22

Goodbye Monte Ruivo!

Eight weeks have flown by and the time finally came for us to move on to new adventures.  We've absolutely loved our time at Monte Ruivo, it really holds a special place in our hearts.

Why the long face?

A special Bromance

The boss Charmeur and also Zilke getting some love.

The gentle Branca

Toni: Goodbye Puppi - Puppi: Slurp!

We got to know Galante a lot better as we've been giving him extra feed.

We've been replaced by a robot for the feeding during the week.

Boy, we are going to miss Molly.

M, the owner, took us out for a Portuguese dinner last night, 'braaied' Frango com Frites (chicken and chips) and some Vinho da Casa Branco (house white) to wash it down; lovely!

A lovely meal out!

We've moved down to a campsite on the Algarve, the south coast of Portugal.  Charmaine is due to fly in on Wednesday and it will be lovely to spend some time with her here.

The very inviting pool at the campsite, a great way to cool down.

More on Albufeira and the campsite once we get settled in and explore in the coming weeks. 

Day trip to Beja

 Wednesday 31/08/22

We took another day trip in Bokkie today, partly to do some food shopping, partly to give Bokkie a decent test drive and partly to try and see more of this area of Portugal.  

We picked Beja, a historic city just over an hour's drive from us, and it was a lovely day out.  

Bokkie performed fantastically so we're really hopeful we have finally made progress on the intermittent fault.  All the work we have done has made a real difference to her and she seems much more smooth on the road.  We have inserted some foam holders for our plates and non-slip pads under all the cutlery as Bokkie occasionally goes over a speed bump too quickly and, as the kitchen is right at the back, items sometime get noisily re-arranged.  She was as quiet as a mouse today, drove like a Rolls and behaved impeccably. Go Bokkie!

The chapel of Saint Andrew at Beja

We feel like honorary Portuguese already, we always have to have an espresso before anything 
else can happen.

The impressive castle keep

I can't see any savages, just as well as I forgot my bow and arrow.

The first floor of the castle; a knight's tomb

Beja was a lovely place to visit, the weather was stunning and we had a great lunch in town before finally heading home.  

The Castle visit was definitely the highlight of the day - it was built by King Denis of Portugal in 1310, as part of the policy to strengthen the defence of this territory, although it's foundations sit on Roman ruins which date from as early as the 3rd century. 

The most significant part of the Castle is the imposing Keep, with its battlements and the veranda all around, all built in marble.  The interior consists of 3 floors and the top is reached by 183 very narrow steps - called the snail staircase, (we climbed them all!) which leads to the most amazing views over the city and countryside; one can only imagine the battles that have taken place over this land over the years.

The very ornate Capela de Nossa Senhora da Piedade

We've also included a short video of the dreaded entrance to the property: the gate is only slightly wider than Bokkie and the road is quite uneven which makes entries and exits rather interesting.  We park Bokkie mid-way along the drive to benefit from the shade of the Blue gum trees as the sun tends to scorch her if parked near the house. Enjoy.

Slowing down at Santa Luzia

 Tuesday 30/08/22

We rarely have clouds in the evening, but were treated to a fantastic
display as the wind whipped these ones into various shapes

We're just over six weeks into our sit and have finished up most of the work planned (and unplanned) for this trip, and are starting to think about moving on.  

In spite of thinking we were finished with the interior painting, Toni and I decided it was the perfect opportunity to do the cab ceiling as this now looked a bit off compared to all the areas we had painted.  We still had enough paint left and the weather is nice and dry here so we decided to tackle it now rather than wait until we were back in the UK or Brittany.  We're very pleased with the result.

Before (lower photo) and after of the ceiling which also holds Bokkie's bed

Toni doing her Michelangelo impression

Happy with the final result, the cab is much brighter

That left us with the limping problem still to be tackled and after much e-mailing and many phone calls to E-Bay and the Spanish courier company, I managed to finally get delivery of the diagnostic cables I had ordered.  This meant I could hook my laptop up to the engine management unit and read off the stored error codes - a game changer for me.

The result confirmed what I had suspected after all the research I had done; it seemed to be related to the throttle control.  I was then able to check the pedal assembly (which seemed to be fine) and then track down the six wires that feed the information from the pedal to the ECU in the engine bay.  I had read these sometimes deteriorate or are damaged and, even though you can't see anything wrong with them, their resistance increases to the point where the results from the pedal potentiometer fall outside the range the ECU is expecting, and it returns a fault and enters limp mode.

The suspect wires under the dash

Using a new red wire as a temporary bypass

When I tested the wires individually, the first three had around 30kΩ, a little higher than expected, the next two were around 2kΩ which is more normal and the third was 312kΩ.  At last I had a firm suspect!  I wired a new cable in for us to test if this resolves the issue - we won't know for certain until we've done some more driving, but I'm really hopeful I may have solved the problem.

To get away from the boring technical stuff, here are some animal videos!

The horses having a canter on a lovely morning.

Molly, the world's chattiest cat.

Horse Hide-and-seek at Monte Ruivo

 Sunday 21/08/22

We love watching the sun set and seeing the different patterns the hills make.
This one looks just like a cat!

This morning we decided to do a horse poop-scoop at the back of the house.  This is the one area the horses can access around the house and outbuildings so we tend to try and keep it clean to avoid stepping in any surprises, and to keep the fly population down around the house.

Finding the perfect spot for a roll is essential.

Bliss!

Unfortunately horses are very sociable and they came over to join us for a while.  Not a problem, we gave them a spray with the hose as the day was going to be very hot.  They then thanked us by leaving giant piles of droppings all over the cleaned place!  Back to square one...

The owners had also explained the game they use to give the horses extra nourishment, hiding buckets of high-energy feed and then letting them find these.  We decided to give this a try as it also lets us separate Galante to get  him some extra rations.  You can see the result in the video, the owners had their own video to demonstrate the process to us and described it as horses chasing a donkey.  I am almost as graceful, but you will notice I was leading the race for a while!

The feed smells wonderful in spite of the look.

The others don't realise he has extra rations

All in all it was lovely to spend some quality time with the horses; they really are fantastic animals.