(written 22/3/2006 in Granada, España, by
Liz)
We slept well despite the previous days excitement, and rushed the nice breakfast at our hotel so we could go across the road to the police station at 9am to fill out a police report. While Tim did this, I tried to find some of our lost items in the nearby chemist, like toothbrushes and toothpaste, but had no luck.
After the police report was finished, we left the hotel and drove to the next town Caldos da Rainha, where we had been given great directions to find the Citroën dealer on the other side of town. Once there, we were told in broken English that our smashed window would be fixed in two hours. As it was 11am by now, we decided to walk the couple of kilometers back into town to find some morning tea.
In town, we sat and had coffee and pastel de nata's, then found a spot outside to sit while we phoned Citroën in France to try and sort out insurance and so on. This done, we walked around the town market, bought some nuts to snack on later, and then wandered back towards the car dealer.
When we got there, we were all ready to get on the road, but we soon found out they hadn't even started on our car, and now it siesta time was about to start, so they were closing up for a couple of hours. We considered walking back into town, but then asked if we could have our car back to sit in while we waited.
We passed the time talking, eating our nuts from the markets, and me attempting to have a siesta also.
A few hours later (4pm), we were finally on our way, window fixed and glass all vacuumed away for us. We had to stop off at a nearby supermarket to replace some of our toiletries, and a couple of other things like socks and undies, and here we also got some sandwiches to take with us.
We found the fast toll-way, and drove south to
Lisboa (Lisbon). Our directions to get to the camp ground weren't too bad, but once again, our map just didn't match up with the actual roads. So instead of driving around Lisbon and finding ourselves at our stop for the night, we ended up driving right through central Lisbon at peak hour, before managing to navigate ourselves to the camp ground Parque de Campismo de Lisboa.
It was getting dark, so we quickly found a flattish spot among the trees and thick carpet of weeds, and put up our tent, which luckily didn't seem to have been what our nasty thieves fancied.
We had seen a Decathlon store near our camp ground, which is like a large supermarket, but for all things sporting and outdoors, so we headed across to there next, spending a while replacing what we could from our lost goodies. On our way back to the tent, we stopped at the camp grounds restaurant for a dinner of soup, before going to bed.
It started pouring rain a few hours later, and continued to do so all night, but we stayed perfectly dry in our little tent.