Spain & Portugal 2017

We have felt the flow of the journey in most of our previous road trips … but Spain & Portugal was not the same. Even though our mode of travel had not changed … we were driving across the vast expanse that is Spain and up and through the mountainous jumble that is Portugal … pretty much doing what we normally do when travelling. The mode was the same … and yet we both agreed that the experience was not that of a fluid journey … but rather of “joining the dots”.
Those “dots”, in and of themselves, each were rich and flavoursome with experience.Individual … and yet connected to the whole.

Why Spain & Portugal?

How did this “journey” start? The stirrings to go to “PORTU-GRAAL”, which means “THROUGH YOU, THE GRAIL”, were felt some months earlier. There was a conference I was interested in. Astronomy and Cosmology. And this Conference was to be at the Castle town of Monsaraz on the border of Portugal and Spain. At the time of the Sepember Equinox.

PORTUGAL … land of megalithic stone circles and dolmens and other interesting rock structures, shares the same longitude and Celtic connection as Galicia and Ireland. GALICIA … any talk of Galicia instantly brings to mind SANTIAGO de COMPOSTELA. The beautiful cathedral of Compostela marks the end of the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage, a walk I had undertaken 18 years earlier. Suddenly I wanted to return to COMPOSTELA!
Flying into Madrid was the best option financially and so we had the makings of a round trip. Once we had “drawn in the circle” on the map, all we had to do then was find the “dots”.

We particularly wanted to see:
The roman mosaics of Merida
The conference was in Monsaraz
There was the druid initiation well in Sintra
The Templar town of Tomar
Our friend Lainey in Castanheira
The Estrella Mountains because anything called “The Starry Mountains” is a must!
The dolmens of the Vila Real region
The tomb of St James in Compostela
The aqueduct of Segovia

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