Friday 18 March

Today is Jamie's birthday! One year old!

As forecast it started to rain during the night and we woke to a steady drizzle which had turned the surface of the aire to ¼ inch of liquid mud. Now YOU try to keep a 12 month old puppy out of it!

Checking the forecast again it was somewhat worse than yesterday and it looks like the entire Iberian Peninsular is in for a wet few days. Obviously we're not going to traipse around Obidos in the rain, neither have we got the inclination – or the time – to wait it out. So the decision was made to abandon the rest of our tour of Portugal and Spain and head for France, the west coast of which promised to be somewhat better.So after packing a soaking wet insulating screen into the shower cubicle, we serviced the van and set out, chuckling at the tourists disgorged from the dozen or so coaches which had arrived for a day trip.

Obidos is not the ideal place to start a return to France from; there are only toll motorways and no direct main roads so doing what we did yesterday we programmed in a destination we thought we could make and let TomTom do it's thing. Well all we can say is that we had an interesting morning seeing lots of little villages, sometimes from very close quarters, and did a lot of steering wheel twirling and changing gears up and down. At times we felt we were going in circles, then we'd be on a bigger road apparently going in the wrong direction, but we kept the faith!

However by lunchtime we felt we were getting nowhere fast so, against all our principals, we said s## it and took off the non-toll restriction. We were almost immediately on a beautifully empty motorway which, although boring and costing some €23, at least got us to our planned destination on the Spanish border at Vilar Formoso and a commercial aire (i.e. privately rather than local authority run) with all facilities. It was being run as a sideline to a bazaar-type emporium which seemed to sell all sorts of odd things, from paper-ware to electrical goods through plastic flowers and many other types of goods.

We joined a couple of vans already parked up and a Funster (Dogsense, Benny & Ruth – we don't know them) pulled in next to us shortly after. However it was still raining, it had hardly stopped all day, so a quick wave was as far as we got with them. Then settle into our usual routine for the evening. We'll only stay one night then push on through Spain tomorrow.