We already had the ferry crossing booked for the next trip, planned for August. That seems such a long time away. So now we needed to find somewhere to stay, we hadn’t booked anywhere till now as we wanted to see if the Hotel Príncipe da Beira was any good. It had done us well on the last trip so we tried to book again, unfortunately we couldn’t get the whole period we wanted.
After a couple of hours research the next best seemed to be the TRYP Covilhã Dona Maria Hotel, but as the names implies it was in Covilhã which was a bit further north and best guess it was about 25 minutes from our property. The price was very good and it did have a swimming pool, which would be really nice in summer. We also needed to remember that whilst we would be there primarily to work on the land, we were also on holiday so should plan for some R & R time as well. Decision made Booking.com to the rescue again the hotel was booked.
Nothing much else to organise thank goodness, that was easy. Oh! Hang on what about the motorway tolls? This time we will be in our own car, not a hire car! How is that going to work? We had taken our car last year, but of course then the charging had not started, now it had.
There’s a great online newspaper we had found during the past few months called “The Portugal News” it was very informative, even if it is very Algarve / Lisbon orientated. It had been running several articles about the motorway tolls. It seemed that the Portuguese has finally got things sorted for the international visiting motorist. They had built special areas at the first motorway service stations on each of the motorways at the borders with Spain. At these areas you could register you car with your credit card and you credit card would be automatically charged as you pass under the auto toll gantries. All sounded very sensible to me, I knew they would get it sorted, they had to really as they get a lot of Spanish visitors.