Oeiras: North bank of the Tagus, a bit downstream of Lisbon and rather a nice marina – well the only one that had brought us fresh bread in the mornings anyway. The local tour included the historic gunpowder factory, the Poets Park (nice but no idea about any Portuguese poets) then an interesting wine tour and tasting – they have started a heritage vineyard and winery to avoid losing their local tradition. We went to the World Heritage site at Sintra on the local bus. It’s a fabulous place, up in the hills do much cooler, and you could easily spend 4 or 5 days going round the various palaces and castles and other sights and doing walks. We chose to walk to the Old Town via the Sculpture trail and go round the Historic Palace of Sintra, ignoring the blandishments of multitudes of folk wanting to take you on bus tours, horse drawn carriage tours, Tuk Tuk yours etc. With transportation no doubt you could get round more attractions but sometimes it’s nicer to just do it yourself. Anyway the Palace was wonderful, everything labelled in English, Portuguese and Japanese so no problem. The most amazing ceilings; and the strange looking white chimneys turned out to be the special flues for the huge kitchens, the palace being built to entertain hundreds of people. After the palace and gardens we had a nice lunch and eventually the clouds parted enough to at least get a picture of the Moorish castle on the mountain top. The last day in Oeiras was mainly spent doing jobs such as glueing up the headlining (it comes down in the heat), putting up the Bimini that we hadn’t used for 3 years, organising the navigation for the next leg and lastly painting our boat name on the harbour wall – a very rush job done while it was blowing a gale, so it won’t win any prizes in the competition. I had time for a 2 minute swim (it was lovely) before we went for dinner.