2013 Tour to Spain & Portugal by Terry and Brenda Law

Well, here it is, our first attempt at "blogging". For our first try we're going to follow our two-month "snowbird" trip to Spain and Portugal, hopefully updating it as we go. We'll add pictures etc. along the way so keep coming back to see what's new. 

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We bought "Bertie" (Bertie Bolero), a Swift Bolero 680FB, in July 2009 - seen here on our first "proper" tour, enjoying the banks of the Rhine. Since then we've undertaken quite a few trips to various parts of the UK and the Continent, but this will be the longest, and the furthest we've yet travelled. We've kept a written diary of all our previous tours - which I might eventually get to add here later - and will continue to do so but we thought it might be nice to share our experiences. Enjoy!

Sunday 6 January 2013

We booked the Channel Tunnel using Tesco vouchers a month or so ago, but only an outbound crossing 'cos we don't have much idea about when we are going to return. With hindsight we could have booked a return and just called and amended it later, we did that last trip with no problems. However we discovered today that our current travel insurance only covers us for max 31 days, as do many policies, so we've had to take out a new policy which still limits us to 60 days but that should be long enough. Bertie is due an MOT in March anyway so we need to be back.

So we collected him from storage yesterday and after a full checkover and a clean have started loading up. The batteries are charging, the fridge is cooling and Bren has spent all afternoon building a big pile of food supplies ready to be loaded tomorrow. There are, of course, no shops in Portugal.......

All the paperwork has been checked and ready to go aboard. As a precaution we've copied all the important documents, passports etc. to Skydrive so if anything goes missing we can get copies quickly via any internet computer. Hope we don't need it of course.

Scheduled (!) departure is Tuesday, staying overnight at Mum's in Navenby (exactly half-way to Folkestone)  and catching the 1520 shuttle on Wednesday.

Now to press the PUBLISH button and see what happens.....