Leaving Mainland Portugal | Why We Are DONE RV Life

It's time for us to say goodbye to RV life on mainland Portugal and move on to new adventures. In this latest vlog, as a retired couple living abroad, we reflect on our time exploring all over mainland Portugal, the vibrant Algarve region, the allure and the longing we have for the sun-soaked days of Madeira. Join us as we say farewell and share our mainland reflections and thoughts on transitioning away from mainland Portugal. 

Transcript

That's right, we quit.

Well we're not in the North anymore. We are in the Algarve. But how did we get here? Let's rewind.

Welcome to Track Us Down, I'm Monique, and I'm Doug. If you're just joining us, our channel is all about retiring early, moving abroad, and living a ‘better second half of life.’ And part of a ‘better second half of life’ for us is adventure and travel and exploring countries in ways that might be a little bit different. So this time we decided to travel in an RV and explore our adopted homeland of Portugal. That's what we've done over the last 3 months, and we've filmed the vast majority of it, over a good 2 months of it. We got a little bit ahead of ourselves, we were doing good, and then… Things took a little turn. The weather hit.

We actually did quit filming all together. We tried for a little bit, we arrived in Porto, and then it started raining. Really raining. Pouring when we woke up, pouring when we went to bed, and because that's part of RV travel we did film a lot of that, and we were in the full rain screaming at the camera. “Porto is SO beautiful!” We soon realized that that doesn't translate very well to a video, does it? No. Take a look at this:

“We're here high up above Porto in the biggest church tower in the land, and we're having a lot of fun but it is pouring rain all the time we're here. Maybe when it's sunny. I think will come back and a specific trip, a direct flight from Funchal to Porto, 86€ return for residents, not too bad.”

It was an Atlantic depression that went on for a good 3 to 4 weeks of raining every single day. From Porto, we continued exploring and enjoying ourselves. It's a little harder in the rain especially in an RV. We did get out every day, we saw the sights - rain or shine - mostly rain..

“So we definitely hit the rainiest time we are going to go…”

“The cost of 8€ lets you into the prettiest bookstore in the world. Of course it's the famous bookstore, Livraria Lello, that JK Rollins apparently wrote Harry Potter in. But you definitely can see how it was inspired by it, so we're going to check it out and maybe buy a book.”

“So another part of the Porto tour is always to hit the São Bento train station, which is famous for the beautiful blue and white tiles all over the walls, and again it kind of reminds me of Harry Potter especially looking at where the trains are..”

“I love the way it goes to an inside/outside open air, and definitely this is the Harry Potter train station…”

“Well we changed spots here in Porto, we're on the beach now in one of the suburbs just kind of south west of Vila Nova de Gaia. It's really nice, it's a great spot, however, it is still pouring rain here you can see it is a super angry ocean. Still great to get out for a walk, love the boardwalks, I'm hoping the weather changes in the next couple of days here.”

[Wind]
“Hmm..Well what can you do?”

“We’re here Porto during Atlantic storm and depression, Aline. it’s dropping tons of water and wind and big waves on all of Portugal. Running here is great though, they have an amazing boardwalk that goes all the way along the coast north and south of Porto. If I keep going south here I think I'll hit a Aveiro. What a view to see waves like this. The sea was angry that day. You can see this car got itself in a little bit of trouble, even though the ocean is over there, the sand here is soft, a bit of quick sand, and that is stuck there for a while. The rest of this storm is coming in, apparently the second round is coming, I need to get back to Stealthy before I get soaked, it's starting to rain and I got about 25 minutes of running to go to get back there.”

We headed from Porto to Coimbra, and we loved Coimbra, we had a really nice time there, loved the university town. From there we went to Tomar, which was one of your favorite places. That's the Knights Templar, their origins are there, it was just a great place to explore. And then off we went to Nazaré, and it was still raining when we were in Nazaré. And then we headed to Óbidos, which we absolutely loved, it was so cute and it's our style cuz it's kind of medieval. But it rained. And from there we went to Peniche - rained again. And from Peniche we headed towards Lisbon, Setubal, Tróia, and we had rain the whole time.

So the long and the short of it is, we went to all the places that we had set out to. We had planned to start with the north, move into the central and then into the south, and we have done all that, and we're continuing to do that, as we finish up our time here on the mainland. But mostly, because of the constant rain, we just stopped filming. It just wasn't coming across the same on video. You just cannot make travel videos in the pouring rain constantly. It just wasn't enjoyable for us, and it wouldn't be enjoyable for you.

So since then, we did go to Evora, and it rained again, and then down here to the Algarve. And that's where we are now. We are exploring the beautiful Algare. There is no more rain, it's sunny I think it's what 25C today? Full sun, it’s been really beautiful weather down here. So for this portion of the Algarve, we have just been on holiday, seeing the sights and enjoying ourselves.

You know, our channel is all about ‘living a better second half of life,’ and that can mean a lot of different things for different people. For us, it meant moving abroad and having this adventure. Living in Portugal, becoming part of the Portuguese culture, and exploring mainland Portugal. Now, Rving isn't for everybody, and I have to say, we've had our fill of it over the last 3 months. It's definitely not something I would want to do full-time in the size that we have, the van that we have, and also just I think part of the demographics that we became part age. At the age that we are. A lot of people who are around us are in two different demographics, they are either much older than us, they're in their “twilight years,” they have big units and they just kind of do their thing. And there's some really young people who are the surfer people, and Monique and I as with a lot of stages in our life, we find that we don't fit in a lot of times. We're just kind of somewhere in the middle so, we've enjoyed it though, I think RVing was a great choice to explore as much of Portugal as as we have. I'm not sure if you can see all the remote places that we've been to if you don't have a car, obviously, or you know you're doing the Airbnb thing. It would be tricky. I think it's possible but the RV certainly made that really nice, and down here in the Algarve the RV is obviously amazing. We've enjoyed the wild camping especially, just being out somewhere on our own, but we have had a bit of a tricky time finding campgrounds that are campgrounds like we know in North America.

Right, completely different. We kind of alluded to this before, the campgrounds in North America, be it U.S. or Canada there's a lot more space over there to begin with so they can have bigger campgrounds, but each site has its own pad, it will have some trees, you have a lot more privacy, you can pull in and and do your hookups for your electricity and your water, and you can actually feel comfy and private. Here, they call them “airies,” it's mostly again just a stopover. Even their campgrounds are just a big parking lot and you are stuffed in here side by side with so many other campers, there's no sense of privacy, and it's just not the same feel as Rving in North America. Or camping in North America.

But the good side about that is often it's not too expensive. The campgrounds that we found sometimes we've shown you, are from 1€ if they're not free, from 1€, 3€, to maybe 10 or 11€, and that can include electricity then, and that can include water, and a dumping station, so all that's great.. But they're not real campgrounds. So when we think of the cost of the last 3 months of travel, there's the campground cost, that is not a huge expense. We do think that having our transportation, our accommodation, and the ability to cook food really was cost efficient and cost-saving. Of course that can be done a multitude of other ways, but we really enjoyed having sort of ‘boots on the ground,’ the RV to go where we want, when we wanted, as we explored Portugal.

And I think going forward in the future, we might stick to more shorter trips like we did with Morocco, or we did with Italy, just a week at a time - maybe 2 weeks - and then come back. We missed Madeira so much and we're going to talk about that in a future video, a bit of a comparison. When you have a pet, not having your pet with you is a big “something's missing.” But of course with Leo, as we mentioned, we could not have done this with him. I can't believe that we had a plane ticket for him and we had originally planned to bring him the whole time. It would would have been a disaster in our small van, and with all that rain, I can't even imagine what that would have been like. That would have been a nightmare, between the rain and a big dog. We're excited to see him, and as Doug said, we're going to talk more about Madeira versus the mainland, and what some of our insights were as we really feel that we got to know this beautiful, amazing country, called Portugal.

We have no regrets about what we've done. We have explored more of Portugal, of mainland Portugal, than most people that we know. Over the course of 3 months we've put on several thousand kilometres all over, and really, we have our fill of mainland Portugal - we love it, but we can't wait to get back to Madeira. With this particular style of videos, the travel vlogs, it’s a lot of work as well. Not only we pre and post-production, we are the “players” in it if you will, and all the editing afterwards and the uploading, and I just found that we were spending a lot of time, too much time, sitting in our van editing and planning and all the other stuff, instead of enjoying our time here exploring. We love to explore, it just became too much with the rain on top of that. And, to be honest, this isn't what a lot of you are about - RV travel - and we get that. But for us, this is a part of exploration in your ‘second half of life.’ It doesn't have to be in an RV, we would be just as happy traveling on a motorcycle through Australia or Africa, there’s so many different ways to explore. This was just one little bit that we wanted to do.

I do feel like we got to know Portugal and this new country that has welcomed us, and I feel like when I think about Portugal now, I know all the little different places and that feels really good. It's part of us becoming part of this community. Not only we know all the little places, we know the styles of Portuguese architecture, we know the the styles and the feel of their cafe culture and restaurant culture, it is very similar all over Portugal and, you know what, to spend 3 months traveling around one particular country - I don't think that we would do that again in the future. It's best to spread it out over a few countries, especially in Europe. But we had a lot of fun actually putting out these videos and doing these travel vlogs despite the amount of work they were. We were really proud of them. I think they turned out really well. If you haven't watched them yet, we highly recommend you go back and watch them because, it's not just about Rving, it’s about living a ‘better second half of life’ in your retirement, and our goal is to inspire you onto your own better second half of life.’ Wherever that takes you in the world, you can do it too. When you retire, you can do amazing things, and that's what we want to show you. And we thank you so much for sticking with us as we took this detour on the mainland. We're almost at the 10,000 subscriber mark and if you haven't yet subscribed, it's a simple contract between us and you: we make the videos, all you have to do is hit subscribe. It's a gentleman's agreement… or a lady's understanding. A lady's understanding.

And our channel will continue back in Madeira, with the ‘better second half of life ,’ information about retirement, sharing our early retirement with you, but also it will include like Doug said, travel elsewhere in a different styles. So if you're new to our channel, we hope that you will continue to follow along and join us as we head back to Madeira.

This has been a great adventure for us. We loved every part of it, except for the rain, but hey, rain happens. I would say not for the rain it's for trying to continue filming during that and put out content during the rain. It was just too much with the amount of work that went into that, rather than just enjoying our surroundings, and we love to explore. I want to go to places again in Africa, I want to go to southeast Asia. We have a lot of world to explore in our ‘second half of Life’ - How about you?

Thank you so much for spending some of your day with us, we're going to get back to enjoying the Algarve, and we will see you in our next video. So as always, check back in, and, Track Us Down!

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