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November 24 Thursday Bicycle touring Portugal from Carro de Sapo Portugal to Setubal Portugal I have another shower this morning and accomplish having an entire shower and only having to use two different stalls. I must be getting faster. We load up our fully loaded touring bicycles and hit the road. Once again,we go through town and past the igloo-shaped ovens. We are getting nowhere fast. Instead of completely retracing our bicycling route from yesterday afternoon, we turn our bikes and head south. In Santana we discover that the grocery store is on siesta until 3 PM. We cycle over mountains to the Arribida coast. From our bicycle seats, we have a great view of the Atlantic. Susan lags way behind (still getting her cycling legs under her), but we reward her with chocolate when she catches up to where we are waiting for her. If there's anything that motivates a cyclist, it's chocolate! We cycle down a very narrow hairpin and curvy road into Portino. People stare at us as if we had just landed on the moon. They clap and cheer as we pedal along a dirt and sand road at the bottom. Must have wondered where in the heck did those touring cyclists come from? Susan and Sharon doff their shoes and socks and check the water temperature. I think Susan is ready to call it a day and would like to stay right here on the beach. Looks like good cycle camping to me. Do we stay? Of course not. A hellacious uphill takes us and our fully loaded touring bicycles back up to a backroad to Setubal. We pull of loaded touring bikes to a halt at an oceanside campground beyond a grey cement factory. We have no food. The campground attendant assures us that the camp store opens at 6 or 7 PM and that it has groceries. He also tells us they have hot showers. Ha. He lied. I hope that's the only thing he's wrong about. Susan and I head to the camp store which is a half-kilometre walk from our campsite. We wait outside, by the camp store, for it to open so we can buy food. We wait in growing darkness; our growling stomachs attest to the late hour and no food in our cycling fuel tanks. After 7 PM, and the store still showing no signs of life, we walk back to the office to enquire. The English-speaking attendant has gone home. He has been replaced by a cranky old non-English speaking curmudgeon. He asks us why we can't speak French? After all, he says he saw the Swiss flag on my bike when we went by earlier. Susan, for a starving cyclists, explains in what I thought were very kind terms that it is a Canadian flag, not a Swiss one. Guess the white and red colours threw him off. Somehow we elicit the information that the camp store is fermé. Yep, it's closed all right. He tells us there is a café one-and-a-half kilometres away on the left, then he changes his mind and tells us it is on the right. Susan and I walk back the half-kilometre to the tent and tell Sharon. She is less than impressed when she learns two things. One: we have no food. And two: now we want her to walk a kilometre-and-a-half in the dark to a badly direction-given café. Three: We had awoken her from a sleep, which certainly didn't help matters. She tells us she is more tired than hungry and that she would just as soon wait until tomorrow morning to eat. Besides, it'll be light then and we may actually be able to see the cafe that we're looking for. Sounds good to me. But Susan groans. She has no reserve fat on her lean little body. I think we better get her some food before she expires. If there's one thing a touring cyclists hates is being hungry and not having any food. Sharon is outvoted for a nighttime stroll to find food. We walk half a kilometre back to the camp entrance gate. We then go on a two kilometre foray into a moonless blackness gambol on a palm-lined road. I'm sure it would be lovely if we could see it. Every so often the scene is illuminated by the headlights of rumbling cement trucks. In the headlights absence, we trip over gigantic fallen palm fronds. After coming to a fork in the road with one sign pointing to Lisbon and the other to some place we've never heard of -- it probably goes back to Carro de Sapo and the clay igloos. We decide to return the two kilometres to the intersection where we started. Once there, we walk in the only other direction possible to go. We come to a somewhat encouraging sign. It has a fork and knife on it and it points toward Setubal. Unfortunately, there is no distance on the sign. It is 8:20 PM. We head off in the direction of the fork and knife. About three kilometres farther we go down a lane and past a military base. A dog follows us along a chain-link fence for half a kilometre, barking furiously. Fortunately, past the military base, we find an ocean-view cafe. Unfortunately, the entrees start --start-- at $40. We hold our empty stomachs and decide we'd rather starve. We walk back up the road, past the barking military dog. I choose three good throwing rocks. When the dog comes and snarls at us again I unleash my selected anti-dog repellent missiles. As a rock clangs against the fence's chain-links I hear a guard call out to the dog. Go ahead shoot me. We come across another fork and knife sign. This time the kilometres shown are 2 km. Wiser folks would have given up, but we struggle on ... it has become a quest. Up and down and around, over cobblestones beside the road. We hit a sign for Setubal, population 400,000, it says. Not one 7-Eleven in sight. In about a kilometre, at 10 PM, we come to another restaurant. As we wearily seat ourselves we couldn't care less if the entrees at this place started at $60. We're hungry enough to eat just about anything at any price. We have the price fix for $14: Bread, soup, olives, red wine, pork chop (yes, singular), French fries, a glob of rice, mousse, and a shooter coffee of about one ounce -- which I put more sugar in than there was coffee. At 11 PM we stumble back out into the blackness and onto the cobblestones for the return hike. I think before we are back I will be hungry again. Should have asked for a doggy bag. Sharon turns her ankle as she drops off the pavement edge as a truck approaches. She had lost her Canada pin somewhere along the way earlier. She is in a very cheery mood. At eleven minutes past midnight we reach the gate to the campground. It is locked. "Oh," Sharon says, "this just keeps getting better and better." After a few minutes, a guard appears. Showing him our three ticket receipts that Susan luckily and thankfully had the foresight to bring with her, we are ushered through the metal installation. The promised hot showers are still cold. We are not happy campers. |
