Tomar

We arrived in Tomar early yesterday morning, and were glad to have made it at all. Our bus left very early in the morning from Nazare, and we needed to check out before anyone was manning the hotel lobby. So, we wrote a note in Portuguese and left our keys in the room. We shut the auto-locking door, left the note and tried to leave the courtyard.

A courtyard with a locked gate, which you need your key from inside the autolocked room to exit. I started to look around for another ´kinley` shortcut (aka leaping down to the street over the wall, but couldn´t find any). Fortunately, someone had left their keys in their hotel door, which we quietly removed, and used - placing them in front of their door afterwards.



Tomar is a foothills type of town, and there is a spectacular Knights Templar Castle/Church overlooking the whole thing. We toured that yesterday, which was pretty jaw-dropping. After a scorching afternoon (classified as: holy shit hot) , we had a had a nice birthday dinner at a restaurant over looking a small river. Thanks for all the b-day messages, I really appreciated them - we´re thinking about you all.

Tommorow we leave for Salamanca and end the Portugal portion of the trip. There is a lot to see here, and everywhere we visited felt very different from the previous town or city. It has also been quite cheap, with us regularly coming in at around half of our daily possible budget.