Road Trip October 2023: Portugal & Back to Huddersfield in 5 Days

Portugal. Our mountain sat in the middle of the beautiful warm sunshine that bathes Portugal all year round.

Except when I’m there.

And I’m not kidding, the weather we have had for the last year has been biblically wet. I’m thinking of building a boat.

The clues lay in my first trip to our mountain hideaway, taking Alison’s caravan over so we had a kitchen and toilet.

A toilet is a five-star luxury. Any flushing toilet.

I had enlisted the help of my friend Matt just in case we got stuck. Planning ahead.

Leaving Huddersfield

So on 16th October, in the rain, I said a very tearful ta-ra to Beyla and Wolfrik.

Beyla did not want me to go and was very upset. She had never spent more than a few hours away from me before.

So, into the van and off to collect the caravan.

I had just got out of the pub car park when Beyla appeared at the wall wanting another cuddle.

So I made my first stop.

Thirty seconds in.

First time in my life I actually felt pain in my heart seeing her very sad face. I promised I would video call and send updates as to where I was.

I got to the storage container, picked up a van load of stuff to take with me, hitched up the caravan and set off.

Next stop was Matt.

Thirty yards away.

And then we were actually off.

We hit the M1 and slowly moved all the way towards Dover, winding through endless 50mph roadworks that didn’t appear to have any roadworks going on.

We played spot the work person.

Matt: 0.
Dave: 0. 😂🤣

Then came the M25, otherwise known as the world’s largest car park, as we inched slowly around the vast orbital motorway.

We finally got to Dover at around 8.30pm, eight hours after setting off. We were towing a caravan and not exactly breaking land-speed records.

Apparently Customs Didn’t Care

I had read a lot of people’s accounts about taking stuff across the border: what to take, what not to take, what would be confiscated and what you might have to pay duty on.

So I had a list of everything I was taking. Household items, tools, bikes and bed frames. Nothing new.

The caravan was bare and I made sure we were underweight.

I also had everything for every eventuality. Spare bulbs, jump pack, hi-vis, breathalyser kits, tool kit, spare phone. Everything.

Even a kitchen sink.

I hadn’t bought a ferry ticket in advance and could have saved about £50 if I had.

We breezed through customs. They didn’t even look at us. Then we hit the ticket desk and passport control and breezed through that as well.

I thought we would be in for a tougher time on the French side.

So we got on the boat and set sail for France.

It was a pretty straightforward crossing. We even had something to eat at 11.30pm. I had a vegetable curry. Yum.

Weird how we had already eaten at tea time, but another meal somehow seemed completely reasonable because we were travelling.

We disembarked and edged towards what we thought was going to be a definite rubber-glove investigation after all the horror stories I had read.

About three miles later we looked at each other.

“Is that it?”

We were out.

Nothing. Not so much as a how-do-you-do.

That was simply our experience on this particular journey. Customs rules are customs rules, whether somebody stops you or not.

In all the trips I have done since, I have only had one customs officer open the van doors. She admitted she mostly wanted to see what the van looked like inside.

She loved the wallpaper and Alison’s decor and started asking where we got the paper, seats and pop-top from because she wanted to do something similar.

France: Mainly Traffic and Cheese

We rolled on for another couple of hours before stopping for the night at about 1.30am, roughly midway to Paris.

We hit Paris around 9.30am and were not disappointed by the traffic.

It was horrific.

Very aggressive driving as we inched our way around. We didn’t see Disneyland, the Eiffel Tower or Asterix Land.

We saw nothing.

Just traffic and graffiti.

Two hours later, around 11.30am, we finally got rolling properly again and decided it was time for lunch, coffee and a much-needed toilet break.

I had the best pizza.

Matt had a burger of some sort.

Mine was a superb four-cheese pizza with beautiful French cheeses. Camembert, blue cheese, goat’s cheese and mozzarella.

I did not want it to end.

Even the motorway vending machine coffee offered FOUR different beans. I opted for blonde and had a “pub biscuit”, as my little boy calls Biscoff.

We set off again and thundered on until around 11pm. We had passed Bordeaux and ended up at Saugnac-et-Muret.

The satnav reckoned we could be at the mountain by 5am if we kept driving, but it didn’t take into account that we were towing a caravan and doing around 55mph rather than 80mph.

I was awake at 5.30am and raring to go.

Old sleepy-head Matt was snoring his head off.

We were rolling again around 7.30am after coffee and delicious croissants.

Spain, €3.45 Crisps and ANUS

We hit the Spanish border around 11am and rolled on until we stopped at Ameyugo, just on the outskirts of the mountains.

The views were impressive.

What we did notice was that the cappuccino was made with UHT milk and was a lot smaller than in France.

The croissants were twice the price and not half as good.

We later stopped near Salamanca for lunch. The vegetarian options were very limited, so I had a packet of crisps for €3.45 and an espresso.

Fine dining.

As we thundered through Spain, we also noticed there was a heck of a lot more graffiti, even in the middle of nowhere.

Every bridge and abandoned building seemed to be scrawled with the word “ANUS”.

This amused us considerably more than it probably should have.

Welcome to Portugal. Here’s Some Rain.

We hit the Portuguese border around 7pm and thundered on through the dark.

Not long until we would get to our mountain.

We were still in shorts and T-shirts because it had been hot all the way through France and Spain.

Then, as we got closer to our mountain, the heavens opened.

And boy did they open.

The rain was something else. It was like somebody pointing a hosepipe directly at the windscreen.

We got to Alcaria at about 8pm and were proper hungry.

The service station was preparing to close, so there wasn’t much left. I had a cheese bap. Matt had something that looked vaguely like pizza with rice.

After food we carried on towards the mountain, but pulled into a service area where we could see the mountains and stay for the night.

I didn’t fancy getting stuck in the dark, in torrential rain, on a mountain covered in wild boar.

This turned out to be one of my better decisions.

Getting Stuck on Our Own Mountain

After a night’s kip on the verge of finally being on my own land, we set off at around 9am.

Now, the rain.

This was what we hadn’t planned for.

I also hadn’t planned for a bulldozer having recently cleared the tracks on my mountain, leaving the ground ridiculously soft.

We left the motorway, rumbled through the last village with shops and a coffee shop, then headed onto the single-track route through the final village.

Up a steep, very narrow street to the top, then back down towards our mountain track.

We just went for it.

Tarmac ended and we hit dirt, with about a 1-in-5 climb on the first stretch.

Matt was suitably impressed with the spectacular view of rain while the wind whipped through the eucalyptus.

We wound around the mountain until we reached the steep drop left onto the track down to my house.

I stopped at the top and decided we should walk it first.

Luckily, behind the driver’s seat, I found a builder’s coat which kept some of the rain off.

Matt had shorts and a T-shirt.

It wasn’t particularly cold.

Just very, very wet.

The track was soft and the left-hand bend had just been scraped by the bulldozer, making it even softer.

We trudged on to the farmhouse.

It was exactly as we had left it.

Overgrown and full of wasps.

Luckily they didn’t like the rain either, so they just glared at us from their nests.

We headed back to the van and Matt drove.

I told him to take the bend wide because it was tight and there was a solid metal post hiding in the bushes.

Matt took it wide and swung left.

The van thought:

NAHHH.

We’re going straight on.

Straight into the pile of mud the bulldozer had pushed in front of the bend.

Luckily nothing was damaged.

We unhitched the caravan, dragged it backwards a few feet to give the van room to reverse and swing around the bend, then hitched it back up.

Eventually we swung onto the final flat bit of track to the house.

We had made it.

I decided we would roll the caravan by hand into the space where I wanted it.

This was tricky because it was on a slope.

And wet.

And very windy.

And very muddy.

And very, very wet.

After much heave-ho-ing we finally got it into place.

Then we quickly unloaded the van and dumped everything in the house.

I had the keys.

Unlike the next trip.

Now We Had to Get Back Off

As it was wetter than a beaver’s bathing suit, we decided to reverse the van up to where we had first got stuck.

This was simple-ish, apart from running the van off the track.

Luckily it rolled forward again, so we could have another go at the bend.

Eventually we decided to go back down to the house, gingerly turn the van around without getting stuck again, and attack the climb forwards.

To give you some idea of how soft the ground was, three years later those tyre tracks are still baked into the mountain like concrete.

This time we rounded the bend and headed up the steep section.

The bulldozer had left a hump near the top which made it particularly tricky.

We built up some speed.

The rear wheels of an unladen long-wheelbase Sprinter scrabbled for grip, slewing left and right through the soft mud.

We got to within about 15 feet of the top where the track flattened out.

And stopped.

Try as we might, the rear wheels would not grab enough surface to get us over the final hump.

We put logs and anything else we could find under the back wheels.

Nada.

Nothing.

Nowt.

We dug. We plotted. We thunk about it.

Nothing worked.

Send a Hilux

My final move was to ring Melanie at Homekey Portugal and ask if she could contact the farmer we had bought the land from to see if somebody could help us.

She was a superstar.

Five minutes later she messaged to say someone was on their way.

So we sat for an hour and a half.

In the rain.

Then an old Toyota Hilux pickup went past.

We cheered.

I spotted Joseph, the old farmer, sitting in the passenger seat.

The Hilux turned around and came back.

The lad driving was laughing so hard at our predicament he nearly choked to death.

Five minutes later, with chains attached, he pulled us the final few feet needed to get off the mountain track.

Fuck me.

The feeling of relief when we edged onto flat road.

Sorry.

Flat track.

I offered them coffee and some euros for helping us.

So off we went for coffee.

Five hours after arriving on the mountain.

Matt was in a hurry.

He was on a promise.

We stopped at what would later become our second home, Cat Cafe. It was closed, so we headed across the road to another cafe.

I ran to a cashpoint and withdrew €100 for the lad who had turned up in the pickup.

He only wanted €20 and gave me the rest back.

So I gave him another €30 and argued with him until he took it.

The 1,500-Mile Dash Home

We said our farewells and flashed back onto the motorway.

We were Hank Marvin and stopped about 100 miles later for a croissant.

Slim pickings in Portuguese motorway services. They aren’t exactly busy. You’re lucky if you see another vehicle on parts of the A23.

Another 40 minutes or so and we were back in Spain.

The journey to the mountain had taken about three and a half days.

Now we had no caravan, hardly any load and nothing much slowing us down.

We swept along at motorway speed commenting on how much quicker the journey home was going to be.

Night fell and we pressed on.

With no caravan to sleep in, eventually we needed a hotel.

Satnav found one and we rolled in at about 10.45pm.

I was manky with mud and sweat and desperately wanted a shower, so Matt and I agreed to meet in the bar ten minutes later.

It was a huge hotel with a casino and restaurant and appeared completely deserted.

€35 for a room.

And they were mint.

Big fluffy bed and a shower that nearly tore your skin off.

Ten minutes later I was in the bar.

Matt already had a pint.

No beer for four days!

We agreed to meet in the restaurant at 6.30am because we wanted to make the last ferry back to the UK.

What a difference in the morning.

There must have been about 300 people having breakfast and nowhere to sit.

We scoffed croissants and cheese and headed off.

One Tiny Battery

The miles flashed by.

We hit France around noon and powered on.

Our next big stop was for fuel and food at around 9.30pm at Bosc-Mesnil, about 150 miles or so from Calais.

Then came something else we hadn’t planned for.

The battery went flat in the Sprinter key fob.

We had just eaten. I had another delicious pizza. Matt had something else. Not sure what.

I called the breakdown service because the services didn’t have the right batteries and the physical key wouldn’t open the van door.

After a couple of hours scratching our heads, I got the old battery and shoved it back into the key fob.

I pressed the button.

CLUNK.

The doors unlocked.

“Fuck me. Get in quick!”

The van started.

That was it.

TO THE FERRY.

No more stops.

We Missed It

We rolled into Calais and could actually see our ferry sitting in the dock.

Loaded.

Ramps still down.

We blasted through the checks and reached the ferry.

Nope.

Next ferry: 2.30am.

BAHHHHH.

Fucking battery.

2.30am rolled around slower than a snail.

You may remember I mentioned it had been windy.

Well, now it was a storm.

We were told the sea wasn’t too rough.

We both laughed.

How rough could it be?

Rougher than a bear’s bum.

We got onboard, ordered more food and ate while the ship was still stationary.

Then it started moving.

And lurching.

Quite a lot.

I decided I was going to find somewhere to sleep and did thusly rather quickly.

I could feel the boat wobbling all over the place and was laughing at people trying to walk in straight lines.

I pulled my hood over my head and tried to sleep.

I don’t know whether I actually got to sleep or not, but there was an almighty slap and I fell off the bench seat.

Straight onto some bloke lying on the floor.

He just laughed.

I got back up, lay down again and this time held on.

Back in England

Thankfully we made it across.

We had been asked a few questions in France and waved through.

England was different.

Where had I been?

What had been in the van?

Why was it now empty?

They had a look inside and underneath.

I showed them photographs from five days earlier and explained that the caravan was now sitting on a mountain in Portugal.

They waved me on.

Phew.

I don’t know why it is, but even though I was doing nothing illegal and have never done much illegal in my life, customs made me feel awkward.

Like I had 5,000 cigarettes hidden under my hat.

We filled up with fuel at Dover and set off for home.

Bear in mind we had been driving all day and most of the night and had managed about 15 minutes’ sleep on the ferry.

We were a bit tired.

So at around 4.30am we stopped on the M1 for an hour.

An hour later, Costa’d up with coffee and buns, we hit the road again.

The most welcome sight was the sign for Sheffield.

That was the mental barrier for me.

Thirty minutes to the pub.

Although I had forgotten I still had to drop Matt off.

We rolled into Matt’s yard and he shot off in his car like a scalded cat.

He was, after all, still on a promise.

I tamely drove back to the pub, rolling into the car park five and a half days after leaving.

Nearly 3,000 miles travelled.

Stuck twice.

Caravan successfully deposited on a Portuguese mountain.

My little girl could not hug me enough.