Praia da Vagueira #1, Portugal 10/13

October 9, 2013

Heading south out of Porto, we had heard that the town of Aveiro was a nice place to visit. Because of its many canals, people call it the “Venice of Portugal”. Like many towns in Portugal, parking is a problem, and in this case, we couldn’t have found a spot if we had been driving a Mini Cooper, so our view was out the window.

Looking for a place for the night, we turned west and by chance, we stumbled upon Praia da Vagueira. There it was, a huge brick parking area right next to the beach. We joined several other trailers and motorhomes. There were public beach showers and bathrooms nearby at no charge. What more could we ask for? As soon as we set up camp we started to talk with neighbors, mostly Portuguese on vacation. They shared maps with us, showed us great places to go and insisted we try their barbecued sardines and mackerel.

It was such a beautiful place, we stayed several days. One night we were treated to a local musical group playing traditional Portuguese songs. (They stopped at midnight sharp!) Each evening we would climb the wooden stairs over the sand dunes to the beach (praia) and watch the spectacular sunset.

This ideal campsite gave us some time to do normal maintenance on the truck and make a plan. We were also fortunate to be able to witness the traditional fishermen launching their unique flat-bottom boats through the waves. We’ll tell you some more about that in the next blog.

The huge brick parking lot was built for vacationing and traveling RVers. Stores, restaurants, beach showers and bathrooms were nearby.

Time for a little maintenance. After just over 2,000 miles, The Turtle V had used one qt. of oil. We took a quart from our 12-gallon reservoir of Amsoil 15-40. Oil on “draft”.