Because last night's camp was in a very poor mobile signal area, I found my phone kept spontaneously switching between Spanish and Portuguese cell networks. This wasn't really a problem except Portugal runs on UCT time whilst Spain runs on UCT+1; so I was permanently either an hour in front or an hour behind where I thought I'd prefer to be. Throw into the mix that overnight last night saw the biannual multinational farce of essentially pointlessly changing clocks back and forth and you may begin to see how setting a reliable alarm in order to collect a wife on time might Start to pose an issue or two. It fried my head.
I came up with a master plan. I manually set my phone's time and then put it into aeroplane mode. Foolproof, surely? Well... no. Essentially I've discovered that there must be some sort of diary built into Android OS that compensates for the (stupid) changes, irrespective of cell or GPS data.
And so, at an actual 4.30am (Portuguese daylight saving time) I was wrenched out of bed fully one hour earlier than I'd cunningly bargained for. Fair to say it was still very dark outside and that the birds etc remained silent, utterly contemptuous of how we humans choose to arbitrarily punctuate totally natural cycles.
Ah well, at least I'd not slept in.
By 9.00am (Portuguese daylight saving time) and 935 miles of solo driving, I'd done my Uber duty, made it to the rendezvous point and found Emma fresh from an earlier run (pic). We exchanged brief pleasantries, loaded her stuff and made a beeline for somewhere that definitely wasn't the Algarve (or anything even remotely redolent of it).
By mid afternoon we were back to business as usual and celebrated by having a hairy moment bogging quite badly whilst trying to get something like level in a potential overnighting spot. As can sometimes happen in such circumstances, all can seem OK and then the ground just gives. That happened, and the entire offside was suddenly sunk in soft mud up to the brake drums. I immediately stopped, assessed, set the central diff-lock, and gingerly engaged reverse. Thanks entirely to the truck's capability, we managed to slew our way fairly unceremoniously back out of the situation with much gratitude if zero style. A cup of tea was necessary.
And so, were now currently set up for the night only about 100 metres from that very spot (but on harder ground) and have had a splendid warm and sunny evening exchanging war stories, bickering, and watching the world.
The area is supposed to be good for lynx so we'll be working the thermal imager and a trail cam later on. Lynx or not, the area's been good for birds and I've chanced a distant sighting of a roller (they're always spectacular) and seen a few (totally new to me) Iberian grey shrike.
This post was composed at 20:10 on Sunday 30th March from our intended overnighting spot N 37.62405°, W 07.68698° / http://maps.google.com/maps?q=loc:37.62405%2C-07.68698