N37.09147 W7.67832 - PEDRAS D'EL REI, SANTA LUZIA - Paying Car Park - 5€

A lovely, sunny start to the day today . We left Armaçao de Pêra after doing the usual ablutions for the camper and ourselves and went to Aldi's near the Algarve shopping centre to do our bit of shopping and eat our lunch in their car park.

After lunch we set off again, we were heading for Alcoutim which is right over by the Spanish border and inland. This was to be the start of our journey north.

We were doing okay, happily travelling on the N125 and the N270 (to miss out the sticky-out bit of land where Faro is located, until we hit Loulé! We've never been through there before and, quite clearly, neither has our SatNav! It would send us one way and then re-calculate and take us round in a circle. In the end Mike said 'I'm going this way' and so we went that way, finding ourselves on the right road again. Another good biking road, a decent road surface with plenty of bends, not quite as twisty as yesterdays though. Back on the N125 we hit the rough road surface we'd encountered when we first came into Portugal from Spain.

When we got to Castro Marim we had to turn left but this took us up to the junction with the A22 which is a toll road. We had already been taken on to a bit of the A22 on our way to Castro Marim. We don't like to do this because we didn't register for the tolls when we entered Portugal and every time I see one of those little € signs at the start of the motorway I get a bit panicky.

Anyway, I'm getting distracted. Suffice it to say that because, once again we weren't paying attention to the SatNav we did another full circle! We could say that we liked it so much, we wanted to do it all again - so we did but I'd be lying. Just before we left the A22 we passed underneath the dreaded camera gantry which identifies your vehicle for the toll.

As Mike was becoming tired I quickly looked in my Camperstop book to see if there was a parking place in Tavira and we are now parked by a river (River Noname) for the night nowhere near our intended destination but hey ho this is what motorhomes are all about.