Sintra

Today we decided to use our little motorbike to visit Sintra, which is full of castle's and palace's and located in the hills near Lisbon. To get there we first took a drive along the coast to look at some of the beach areas near the city, before heading up into the hills.

I'm very glad we took the motorbike instead of the motorhome as the roads are quite tight in places plus there were occasional restrictions in where you could go as some roads were closed to anyone that didn't have a permit.

There are lots of potential places to visit but we decided to have a look around the Monserrate Palace which is a lovely building and gardens built by Sir Francis Cook around 1860, to be his summer home. It has a mix of Gothic, Indian and Moorish influences with some English bits as well - all very pretty and interesting.

After the visit to the palace we'd arranged to meet up with a former colleague of mine, Pedro, and his wife as they live locally.

They took us to their favourite restaurant which specialises in salt cod. Not something I'd tried before but it turned out to be excellent. It was such a good evening that we ended up being a lot later that expected and had to ride back to the campsite in the dark. We weren't really dressed for that as it'd been hot during the day but was a lot cooler after dark!