A Visit with our Portuguese Friends
We left Rota at 12:30 Monday afternoon headed to Lisbon.
It was a poor choice, the temperature was near 100 F. We were half cooked
by the time we made it through the traffic jam in Seville. We stopped for
the night at Évora in Portugal and made it to Nuno's store about noon the next
day. (Nuno is the great guy who stored our bike while we returned to the
USA for Kathy's chemotherapy.) He called some more members of the GoldWing
Clube de Portugal and we went to his family's restaurant for a huge lunch.
It was an excellent meal. Afterwards we went to a nearby campground and
rested.
The next day we rode up to Porto and met with Tim, his wife
Julie (Americans missionaries in Portugal) and Carlos and his wife Nela.
They are all members of the GoldWing Clube de Portugal. In fact Carlos is
the President of the club. (Those of you reading this who are leading a
Chapter of the GWRRA will have sympathy for him. He is a great guy who
tries very very hard to please all the members, a chore that is impossible to
complete, and it bothers him.) We went to the same seafood restaurant we
had eaten at the last time we were here. The food was just as great.
Tim, Julie, Carlos, Nela, Kathy, myself and 3 other of their friends (from the
USA) ate a huge platter of excellent shellfish. We stayed with Carlos and
his family for a few days, visiting the sights and resting in their fine house.
 On
Thursday Carlos held a BBQ for us and invited several club members, friends and
family to join us. We had excellent food followed by Fado,
the famous Portuguese music. It is a sad music about sad events in ones
life, similar to the Blues in idea but totally different in sound. With
that soulful music we drank Aquardente, the potent Portuguese liquor that is
similar to moonshine in the USA, but it is now legitimate and sold in stores.
 On
Friday Carlos, Tim and I took a short ride (120 miles) through the mountains of
northern Portugal. We traveled up switchback one-lane cobblestone roads,
over the top of the mountains, past canyons, lakes and
waterfalls with swimming holes beneath, through a National Park,
 and
into Spain. Shortly after we entered Spain we went through a small village
that had some of the old stone granaries. This is where the farmer used to
store his corn and grain to keep the mice and birds from eating it before he
could. These are totally made of stone, the posts, floor, roof, all is
stone. We went on into Spain to fill the gas tanks instead of turning
around at the border in the pass. Gas in Spain is
about 30 cents cheaper per liter than in Portugal, in other words, it is about
$6 a gallon instead of $7.
We got back home late and then Carlos and I worked on installing
the passenger armrests on a friend's GoldWing until midnight.
 On
Saturday the Club was having a ride up the Douro River to a small wine village.
The Douro River area is a huge wine producing area making Port wine. It is
a very mountainous region with steep sided valleys and canyons. The roads
twist and turn along hillsides and through little villages. These villages
were built when a horse or mule was the main transportation, so roads are narrow
and wind through the hills like a broken backed snake. The boat in the
picture is what was used to transport the wine to the city of Porto before power
boats were available. Today it gives tours.
 The
ride consisted of about 75 miles of windy switch-backed road each way. The average speed
is about 30 mph with some stretches even slower. We had a wine tasting in
an ancient Port winery with fantastic painted tile walls depicting work scenes
from the 1800's, lunch in an open air restaurant
 and a tour of a typical wine
village from the 1800's. This village was losing its young people and had
died. At one time it had been a self-supporting village of a hundred or so
people, but with the 20th Century its residents had moved on to bigger and
better places. A rich man, who was born in the village, has bought it;
lock, stock and barrel. And he is fixing it up to be a destination resort.
A quiet one, it is a long way from any kind of modern entertainment. He is
repairing and improving the original stone homes with electricity and indoor
plumbing, repairing the roofs, windows, floors, walls, etc. and doing a nice
job. But they are still just stone huts the same size that the residents
lived in, with the too undersized doorways and ceilings for an American sized
person like me. We were given a tour and then sat around and drank beer
and wine.
 We
left late in the evening and we finally got back to Carlos' house about 11:00 PM
and talked 'til midnight.
On Sunday we were planning to leave about 10:00 and go to Évora in southern
Portugal by going through
the mountains. But it was raining so we delayed. Anyway Carlos
wanted us to join him and his family for their traditional Sunday dinner with
his entire family, right down to the grandkids. After another good meal we
finally got underway about 2:30 PM. We took the fast toll road south to
avoid the rainy mountains and got into town about 6:00. We have returned
to Évora to get the clutch replaced before we get into the Alps. We have
too many miles of trailer pulling through the mountains of the western USA and
the clutch is starting to slip under heavy use. Jose, the international
representative for the GoldWing Clube de Portugal owns the Honda shop in Évora
so it works out great for us.
Next we head toward Denmark and the first ever GWRRA European WingDing.
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