Last week we made an overnight trip in Wendy, our motorhome, to the seaside town of Costa Nova. We’ve been working for 3 weeks straight on improving my home in Portugal so it was time to take a little break.
Before we arrived in Costa Nova we stopped off in Aveiro, which is known as the ‘Venice of Portugal’. It’s worth a visit to see the ‘moliceiros’, which is the Portuguese word for gondolas.
It was busier than we expected for the first week in May, so we quickly grabbed some lunch and a coffee before heading for the coast. I love Portuguese coffee!
Mum enjoyed a crepe with ice cream and ‘ovos moles’ filling, which is an egg-flavoured snack that Aveiro is famous for.
After lunch we headed to Costa Nova, which was the complete opposite of Aveiro. It felt like we had the whole place to ourselves and as a bonus the weather had warmed up!
Costa Nova is known for its brightly coloured houses and beautiful sandy beaches. As a result, it’s a very popular tourist destination during the summer and on sunny weekends, but not while we were there!
From what I’ve read, the houses are painted brightly to resemble the moliceiros (the gondolas) that you will see in Aveiro. The area is well-known for seaweed harvesting too.
We found a quiet place to park up for the evening and took Poppy for a long walk along the beach.
It was my first overnight trip in Wendy and we made the most of it. I was determined to get the deck chairs out, drink a beer in the sunshine, and read my book. The sunshine was lacking but we weren’t deterred!
We learnt a lot about how Wendy works and we’re already planning our next trip out.
3 Responses
Laura, thank you for your blog post. Really thank you! Awesome.
Hi Laura,
Aha! Pressure washing. Thanks for the article. My first impression on my visit to Portugal was that it needed pressure washing and I wondered if the washers were available. I read a post by another blogger, a world-traveler, who chose Portugal as a place to settle down and was all enthusiastic about it. then updated her post 18 months later saying she returned to the UK because of mould. My experience with the UK is that it has mildew of its own and rising damp in the older houses which don’t have a damp course. For that reason, I have been thinking I had to buy an apartment above the ground floor in Portugal, but you give me hope that I might have more choices. Does your dad’s house have a problem with rising damp on the walls….how old a house is it, and do you think it has a damp course, i.e. damp proofing? And do you know if there is paint which is mildew resistant, I think its called microbial. That is standard in some places. Thanks for the info and I’m excited to be coming to Porto.
Harriet
Hi Harriet! Yes, Portuguese houses tend to be damp. We used to have rising damp all over the place. We couldn’t find paint that was mildew resistant in Portugal so in the end we bought it in the UK and drove it over and repainted the whole house. The location of the house is a key thing. You want a house that isn’t in the valley bottom and barely gets any sun during the day. I spent a month staying in a mountainous area of Portugal called Serra do Açor and a lady there suffered from all sorts of lung infections because of damp in her house. Porto is one of my favourite cities, so I know you will love it. Thanks for commenting!