Property 6 [Photos] – We drove out of Castelo Branco towards the west for around 15 minutes, it was still raining but there were short periods where the rain eased and luckily as we pulled up on the plot, the rain stopped, however the ground was quite soft under foot. There was an interesting little cottage on the plot, which looked like it had a newish extension, this while it was nice on the inside; to me it did give the property a strange look.
Teresa was quite keen on this property; it had a reasonable amount of land, slightly odd in shape, a few fruit trees, mainly apples and the cottage still had a bit of a ruin attached, so scope for more development. It also had the advantage and interesting quirk, of at the village end of the land; there was a second ruin, which had a door and window to the main high street in the village. Just too highlight if the village had more that 25 properties and saw more that 5 cars a week it would have been a busy day. This gave a further bit of scope for future development.
The cottage was connected to the electric and had the advantage of mains water, borehole supply and a well. It was interesting property and had potential, but it was still very early days and we knew we have a lot more to look at and from what we had seen to date we knew we could get the sort of thing we wanted for our money, more importantly it was becoming clearer what we did want.
We jumped back into our Hyundai ix35 and followed Maria and Paulo in their little Saxo, how nimble and rapid those little cars are, so trying to keep up as best we could we set off again. Not knowing, we thought we were on our way to the next property on the list, but nope, before we knew it we were pulling into a tiny car park around the back if the Remax office. We managed to squeeze our rather larger vehicle into a suitable space.
It was just coming up to 12 o’clock; we were told ok we will see you at 2:00pm, back at the office. Oh! Right! This was our first and I can assure you not our last experience of the Portuguese style of living, 2 hour plus lunches, etc. It all sounds ok to me and again what we expected, but when it happens it’s just so alien.
So not knowing the town or area or much language we ended up in the local Pingo Doce, a supermarket chain a bit like our co-operatives where but it did have a small cafeteria a bit like our Tesco’s. So squaring up to the challenge of trying to order a lunch in Portuguese and about 15 minutes practice on what to say we picked up our trays and ordered, only to get the reply of “Do you what chips with that” Do I need to say more!
So suitably fed and watered and making use of the facilities, which were something else I can tell you, plus a further lengthy visit to a nearby café for a coffee, it’s amazing how long you can make an espresso coffee last. I have to highlight at this point that in Portugal, particularly in the area we are in the concept of a large latte or Starbucks is only something the locals may have seen on television if they had one, or in a national paper.
We headed back to the Remax office. After prizing the car out of the car park, we set off following the two little demons in the Saxo, we turned on the motorway (A23) it was still toll free and headed off to the north. We seemed to be driving for hours; in reality it was about 45 minutes before we came to the next property.