If I was a head shorter, I could be Portuguese.

Yes, the following three rumours are true. We are slowing down, being bad tourists and getting lazy. Our time in Europe is grinding to a halt and, strangely enough we aren’t too fussed by it. We are still having a grand old time discovering new cities, new cuisine and new booze but after so long on the road the things that weary us seem to be outweighing the golden moments.

We are now about 80 days and 13000kms into the Western Europe leg of our trip. To experience the places we wanted to visit, our time has been split something like this, four nights destination A, pack up, drive 4 hours, unpack, four nights destination B, pack up, drive 4 hours, unpack... Repeat. It’s very taxing, mainly because we are not talking about unpacking two suitcases, we are talking a large sedan worth of stuff. A regular modern day gypsy caravan.

Though neither of us are particularly Christmassy, we are both feeling a little more homesick (for want of a better term) as people back home gear up for the holiday season.

Enough moping, in two and a half weeks we drop the car back off in Paris, pick-up a final felafel in Le Marais, spend a brief three days in London before hopping a plane to India. Then Melbourne bound on the 4^th of Feb (for those at home keeping tabs, we have cut HK off the itinerary, send money).

Now back to the good stuff. Since our last blog we have driven from Jerez in Spain, to the Algarve region of southern Portugal, where we stayed six nights (exception to the rule) in fairly rugged farmland. Our host was an eccentric Belgian/Sth African/Spaniard who was in desperate need of a good scrub. The property was beautiful, our favourite feature being the double fronted glass fireplace that divided the main living area and the bedroom.

While staying there we visited a sad looking bird sanctuary, apparently the site is an important one for winter migratory birds. To us it felt like a lot of money had been spent setting up the facilities, maybe twenty years ago, but since then funding cut and the entire sanctuary fallen into disrepair. I hope this is not representative of other important ecological sites in the country.

One afternoon we tried to walk from our cottage to the coast. It turns out that a lot of Portugal’s roads aren’t mapped on Google maps or our cars GPS. So without our usual pre-Google-mapped instructions or a map (paper maps are for old people) we headed south, backtracking often when we realised a “road” was actually somebody’s driveway. Amongst the awe-inspiring veggie gardens, the vocal dogs and a curious array of poultry; we saw a man knocking pine cones off a large tree. Fresh pine nuts (without the pine mouth) from the back yard? Sounds divine. I wonder how long the trees take to reach maturity.

After the Algarve we drove north through central Portugal to the Alentejo region. The landscape on our way there was dotted with eucalypts, we wound down the windows to enjoy their familiar scent. The roadsides were patterned with alternating groves of cork oaks and olives, herds of cattle and flocks of happy looking sheep.

Alentejo is also one of Portugal’s major wine growing regions. Our very gracious hosts even had their own vineyard (see review at end).

From there we drove north again to Porto, home of... you guessed it- PORT! My beau’s favourite post-dinner tipple. We only visited one of the major Port caves, Graham’s. They are owned by the Symington group, who also owns Dow’s, Warres (pronounced Wars) and a few others that I hadn’t heard of.

Of the six ports we tried our favourites were:

Dow’s 1985 Vintage, C- ribena-esque, N- rum-raison chocolate, touch of caramel, P- amazing acid and fruit, blackcurrant & cocoa

Graham’s 20 Year Old Tawny, C- Deep amber, N- coffee, treacle, butterscotch, P- buttered popcorn

In Alentejo we drank (amongst other things!) Herdade de Maroteira Syrah 2008, approx €18 (a princely sum for a bottle in Portugal) - C- Inky garnet, N- liquorice, dark chocolate (70% cocoa), incense-like spice, P- sweet raspberries, cocoa & burnt toffee, upfront fruit and soft tannin.