Haaaaa, luxury

What a nightmare trip today, so cold this morning. The thermometer I passed on the motorway said 6C, but that was before I spent about 2 hours climbing up the motorway hills. Total road time today was 4.5 hours and it would have been a real nightmare if I had not had those heated gloves. Another bad day for winds as well, at least until I crossed the Portuguese border, then they appeared to drop off. Lots of scary high long bridges over valleys as well. Had to pay close attention to the wind socks to gauge the speed and position when crossing, the strong, gusting winds, meant I had to lean into the wind and be ready for any wind correction as it happened. Interesting riding, especially with mad Portuguese lorry drivers one side and a 500 meter drop the other.


The weather was a lot better towards Lisbon and I nearly decided to camp, but I had had problems with the Satnav losing all the map data for Spain and Portugal, so needed to reinstall all the maps. Garmin is quite useless in this area and it can take many hours to reload from the Garmin site, so Power and WiFi were essential. So far I had been using MapsMe on the iPhone, but the screen is difficult to see in daylight.


Riding into Lisbon I quickly discovered that the road system is basically spaghetti and a nightmare to navigate through, especially using an iPhone as a satnave and not being able to read the screen in bright light fully. So lots of missed turns and swearing. So I decided to first find the Hertz office where the chaps would be picking their bikes up tomorrow morning (2 were flying in from Ireland to join me for 3 days). Low and behold and a nice hotel right next to the Hertz building and with secure parking.


So looked on booking.com and had a double superior room for 150Euro. So went in and they said 230Euro. So I went on booking.com and booked. Went back inside and had to wait for the booking to go through to the hotel. Took ages. they kept phoning booking.com to see why it took so long. Anyways, comes through 45 mins later. So, as compensation to an already discounted room, they gave me an upgrade to a room with a view and a 15 Euro voucher towards breakfast.


Such a nice room after such a tough day.

And what a shower, big enough to fit a small cheerleading team in.

Anyways, the plan worked.   We now have a fully functioning Garmin with all the routs for tomorrows ride loaded and ready.