Hi All,
just wanted to share a few photos ect from a 2 week trip to Portugal. We went with the intention of driving as much off road as practical while slowly making our way from the north to the south where we would meet up with some friends before returning home. We used the ferry to go from Portsmouth to Bilbao.
No real plan as to what routes we would take, just follow our noses and see where it takes us. We used the Wikiloc app for the majority of the off road routes we took. Not all of the routes were 100% possible to follow due to the trail being too narrow for my LC to fit down or the trail was so over grown you could hardly see it, or in one occasion it was all fenced off. Non of these times was it a major issue, the app can show the un paved roads in a similar format to say and OS map so we just made up our own route that way. Majority of the time this worked out perfectly. We did turn around once as the trail was too off camber and steep into a sharp gulley with a very steep climb up the other side. Having never really done any kind of off road driving before I was not sure if we would be able to make it out of the gulley or roll over on the off camber!
Our rough route from Bilbao with out a day by day break down was along the northern Spanish coast to the 'Most beautiful bench in the world' O banco mais bonito do mundo · P6VW+PX, 15339 Loiba, A Coruña, Spanien - [Leaving Land Cruiser Club] which we managed to make just before sunset, perfect start to the trip! There was a little camp site there with basic facilities that we stayed in. We then Headed to Braganca in NE Portugal where we started our first proper off road routes. We kept relatively central as we headed south until we were roughly parallel with Lisbon where we went across to Sintra for a day by the beach. The last day of trails we did was starting south of Lisbon in a very sandy dune type area, was so fun to drive on, reminded me of being on snow!
The trip was all camping, either wild camping or a mainly smaller municipal sites which were great, stupidly cheap, but normally with great facilities, showers, toilets, bbq areas, electric if you need it. The official camp sites mainly we found using the Park4night app which was brilliant, all places apart from 1 we turned up to had spaces and were open. I think being September helped massively as the main holiday season is over.
Sorry it will pretty much be a photo dump of the holiday, but I didnt have the motivation or network to write up a day to day blog of the trip....maybe next time. I would so recommend something like this to people who maybe are like me and have never done any type of off road trip like this. We certainly didnt do the whole thing off road, but some days we probably drove around 6 hrs pretty much all off road. We only had 2 weeks for the trip and had friends in the Algarve to meet up with at the end so some longer road bits were of course used to make progress through the country. Such a lovely place, really rural in places, I think the locals were not sure what was driving though their village by the stares we got at times!! haha!
Hope you enjoy the photos!
just wanted to share a few photos ect from a 2 week trip to Portugal. We went with the intention of driving as much off road as practical while slowly making our way from the north to the south where we would meet up with some friends before returning home. We used the ferry to go from Portsmouth to Bilbao.
No real plan as to what routes we would take, just follow our noses and see where it takes us. We used the Wikiloc app for the majority of the off road routes we took. Not all of the routes were 100% possible to follow due to the trail being too narrow for my LC to fit down or the trail was so over grown you could hardly see it, or in one occasion it was all fenced off. Non of these times was it a major issue, the app can show the un paved roads in a similar format to say and OS map so we just made up our own route that way. Majority of the time this worked out perfectly. We did turn around once as the trail was too off camber and steep into a sharp gulley with a very steep climb up the other side. Having never really done any kind of off road driving before I was not sure if we would be able to make it out of the gulley or roll over on the off camber!
Our rough route from Bilbao with out a day by day break down was along the northern Spanish coast to the 'Most beautiful bench in the world' O banco mais bonito do mundo · P6VW+PX, 15339 Loiba, A Coruña, Spanien - [Leaving Land Cruiser Club] which we managed to make just before sunset, perfect start to the trip! There was a little camp site there with basic facilities that we stayed in. We then Headed to Braganca in NE Portugal where we started our first proper off road routes. We kept relatively central as we headed south until we were roughly parallel with Lisbon where we went across to Sintra for a day by the beach. The last day of trails we did was starting south of Lisbon in a very sandy dune type area, was so fun to drive on, reminded me of being on snow!
The trip was all camping, either wild camping or a mainly smaller municipal sites which were great, stupidly cheap, but normally with great facilities, showers, toilets, bbq areas, electric if you need it. The official camp sites mainly we found using the Park4night app which was brilliant, all places apart from 1 we turned up to had spaces and were open. I think being September helped massively as the main holiday season is over.
Sorry it will pretty much be a photo dump of the holiday, but I didnt have the motivation or network to write up a day to day blog of the trip....maybe next time. I would so recommend something like this to people who maybe are like me and have never done any type of off road trip like this. We certainly didnt do the whole thing off road, but some days we probably drove around 6 hrs pretty much all off road. We only had 2 weeks for the trip and had friends in the Algarve to meet up with at the end so some longer road bits were of course used to make progress through the country. Such a lovely place, really rural in places, I think the locals were not sure what was driving though their village by the stares we got at times!! haha!
Hope you enjoy the photos!
