Welcome to Spain!
Already arrived in Destination #2: Oria, Spain. After our fun, exploratory day in the Douro Region, we stopped in Bragança, Portugal on August 1 for a few hours to check out the old castle/citadel and the walls that surrounded the original small town. The castle is now a military museum, and all four of us learned a lot about medieval to WW1-era military history in Portugal and Bragança. The girls seemed interested and asked some really great questions and learned a lot, but their favourite part was definitely walking the walls! The views from the walls were impressive. We were up quite high on a large hill/low mountain. We talked about military strategies and how difficult it would have been for an army to try to break in and conquer this town/keep. Basically impossible!
After leaving Bragança mid-afternoon, we officially left Portugal and entered Spain. We stopped briefly in Zamora to stretch our legs before arriving in Salamanca for the night. It was a long, painful check-in process that left us all extremely frustrated and exhausted. Our first truly difficult experience with Air BnB in general. But, we got settled into our perfectly situated location right at the entrance to the old square, Plaza Mayor. We walked around, checked a few restaurant menus, and settled on one in the square. Afterwards, we walked around Salamanca for a little while before heading back to get a good sleep before our early morning.
After another brief, early morning walk around the largely empty square, we hit the road for our 11-hour travel day on August 2. We drove into Madrid and caught a train down to Alicante, where our host in Oria picked us up and drove us the 2.5 hours back to Oria. He was kind enough to stop at a grocery store on our way into town, so we could grab some ready-to-eat burgers for a quick dinner and some staples to get us through breakfast the next morning.
We finally got here around 7 p.m., dropped all our bags off in our apartment, and then went outside to relax on the rooftop patio to unwind. We met our neighbours across the hall, who are a lovely family from Israel. Zohar and Aviv and their three teenage children. Aviv showed us where the communal playroom/library was located, and our children disappeared there for a few hours! While they were enjoying the playroom, we finally opened up that Port we bought a few weeks ago in Porto. We also had a delicious Porto dark chocolate bar we hadn’t yet cracked open that went exceptionally well with our 10-year tawny port!
We are settling well into Oria so far, which we will get into more in our next post. Our dreams for this summer were to have five weeks together as a family in a small town in Portugal to decompress, spend time together, get outside and get active, and generally just relax. We then wanted to spend the rest of the summer (four weeks) in this small, mountainous town in rural Spain where we could experience more of a community. We wanted a place where the girls could make friends, relax, play, and socialize. We likewise were interested in meeting some other adults to socialize with for a bit. And while we do intend to socialize a fair bit, we do still plan for this month to be a family-focused month.
The place we are staying (Shepherd’s Rest) is a permanent worldschooling hub (more on that later), meaning that families from all over the world are coming here and staying for a few days to a few months at a time. Some are travelling non-stop for years, some for short periods of time. They have two properties, the one we are staying at and another one nearby so there are seven guest families plus the host family here. There’s also the sister of the host who has moved here with her husband and children permanently and living nearby who is also a part of this community. So far, this has been a wonderful experience for our family.
