Portugal..

I'll write about France and stick some photos up at a later date, but for now, here's the story of Portugal so far.

After a pretty hairy drive down through Spain from France, where for about 100 miles all we saw were brothels, truckers and trucker hotels, we arrived in Peniche. Kinda weird little town that reaks of fish because of a large fish processing plant that sits at one end of the main break Supertubes. But we figured we wouldn't care about that when Supertubes was on, and it was only really unbareable for about 20 seconds as you drove past the plant itself. It was flat at Supertubes on the first day, so we had a nice mellow surf at one of the town beaches. It was after this surf that stuff started to go a bit wrong. First the sat nav broke, but I figured I wouldn't be using it for a while and could probably get it sorted before Spain, so it was no biggy. Then one of the fuses in the van went, but after cutting the zip tie which had been used to hold up the fuse panel, that was also relatively easy to sort. However then the van would not start, and this has transpired to be a bit more of a problem. I called out some mechanics who after a lot of hand gesturing and speaking loudly and clearly in our respective languages managed to communicate they would not be able to fix it and it would have to go to a garage. The next day supertubes was on, so we made the half an hour so skate to the contest site, and I shot the comp in near perfect barrels all day, which was sick. After the comp we decided to skate into to town to get some food, which was a horrendous experience as Peniche county council (or whoever makes such decisions in Portugal) has decided that cobbling all the streets is the way to go, creating one of the most un-skateboard friendly towns I've ever experienced. Through a combination of this cobbling, and the careless placing of my board on the beach in France, which caused it to get a thorough rinsing from the incoming tide my trusty longboard decided to add itself to the list of broken possessions. As I'd just left the town centre of Peniche and done just under of a quater of the distance back to the van, my baring snapped and the wheel flew off, making my only remaining transport un-rideable.

Last night we decided that it would be a good time to check out the nightlife of Peniche, and after 4 hours of red herrings, closed clubs, a vip party and having some Portugese guy, who his friends informed us was on acid, laugh hysterically in our faces we found a little beach bar, where we enjoyed some cheap (comparitively to Hossegor) beer, and met some cool people.

This morning I was awoken by a large Portugese man who had come to tow the van, so we rolled out of bed, and got into his tow truck and without a huge amount of optimism, headed for the nearest garage . On arrival I was greeted by two workers telling me to come back around 4 to discuss what the problem was. That was at 10 am. Which brings me to now, sitting in the Maccies in Caldas de Rainha, with about 4 hours still to kill, (missing epic supertubes) before I can find out whats even wrong with the van, whether its fixable, and how much its going to be... Fingers crossed eh...