April 4, 2024
Alter do Chão to Castelo de Vide
A beautiful, sunny day and not too many kilometers, the day looked promising. No need to start earlier than ten. I had us routed through town, hoping to get an impression of Alter do Chão since we were too tired yesterday to have a look. Today we got a very brief impression, and that was of its cobble stones. With Susan and Janos following me, I charged up a steep and roughly cobbled road. Midway Susan called, I'm not doing this! Meet you on the other side of the town. I figured it wasn't such a good idea either to use up our energy and batteries in the first half hour of the day and decided we should turn back and get on the flat and smooth road skirting Alter do Chão. While we were debating which road to take, an elderly, friendly and delightfully talkative woman stopped and asked if she could help. She spoke only Portuguese and we didn't understand much but we got the jist of it. No, she had never heard of there being a castelo in her town. But we should go to the royal stables. We got lengthy and detailed instructions how to get there and then went merrily on our way, hoping she didn't see that we didn't take the turnoff she recommended. We didn't realize we were missing the highlight of Alter do Chão.
Only when doing a bit of research for this entry did I read: "It was the will of a king (King João V) that gave birth to what would become the mother house of the Lusitano thoroughbred horse in Portugal, the Alter Stud Farm (founded in 1748)."
Today the landscape changed from the wide open spaces we had cycled through so far to a hillier terrain with fewer sheep and less cattle. The fields were enclosed with stone walls and as we got closer to our destination we saw fascinating outcroppings of rock and boulders in the fields.
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Today was short on kilometers but not on vertical meters. We had more or less a steady climb with some dips until we got to our hotel. As we got closer to Castelo de Vide, the road got steeper and boulders and rocky outcrops dominated the views. Not that I was going to stop too often for pictures on the ascent.
As we expected, the tail end of the ride up to our B&B was near impossible - steep and cobbly. Then the comedy of errors began.
I have been using the hotel addresses as listed in Booking.com for mapping our routes, but alas they are not always accurate. That was the first problem. The second was that Janos and I had different versions of the end of the day's route, Susan had again another. To add to the confusion, and this was entirely my fault, I thought the three of us were staying at the same address, therefore the best idea would be to just follow Susan. I didn't even know the name of our lodgings. Add to the mix we were all a bit exhausted from the climb. Susan contacted her host, and after a while got the code for a key box. We thought we would be upstairs from her and brought all our paraphernalia down the steep cobbles from where we were waiting and secured our bikes to the window grid. I wondered why the host wasn't answering me so we could get our key. Well, because we weren't booked there.
I know this is a lot of detail, but just to give you an idea of the contortions we went through before we were in our proper B&B. Janos thought this was all crazy and that we should be going somewhere else, except he didn't have the right address for our accommodation either. A comedy of errors where no one was laughing. Eventually our host found us, our room was just around the corner.
This was actually a short version of our odyssey. It was a lot of unnecessarily lugging our bags and bicycles up and down steep little streets, where if a car happened to come by you had to flatten yourself against the wall.
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It was a relief to finally get settled in, our B&B was nicer than I could appreciate at the moment and we went out for an early dinner at a tapas bar/restaurant that Susan organized. She was still functioning a lot better than Janos and me.
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After a short rest and shower, then a fine meal, ruffled feelings were mollified and all agreed it had been another great day, with a litle hiccup at the end. All's well that ends well.
Today's ride: 47 km (29 miles)
Total: 155 km (96 miles)
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