It never rains in southern california

It might not rain in southern california, but it always rains a lot when I go the the Peneda-Geres National Park... Which on one hand was bad, because I could not go hinking, on the other hand th ehiking path I wanted to do the first day would have led me directly into a forest fire, so although I did get wet to the bones, at least I did not get burned.

I went for a car trip instead, which was really nice, although I will never go again to a megalithic site close to the road again. Close is relative and might be long enought to get you really wet in the rain and if you have seen one megalithic thing, you have seen all. It's just at the name suggests some big stones...

Shown on the picture above are espigueiros, little stables to dry corn in them despite the usual quite wet weather there.

Changes

Some things never change, some do. I still get handshakes from the waiters at the cafe I spent half o my stay in portugal. On the other hand, having a coffee and a cognac there now costs a fortune compared to the good ol' days. But for compensating it was full of nice girls (unfortunately half of them french). One of them looked like the twin sister of a girl I know from Erlangen...

Tomorrow I will go up north, to the Serra do Geres, trying to find a camping site in the part which is not burning. If you don't hear anything from me in the next five weeks, I got a stroke while trying to do some walkabouts in open sun with something like 32°C...

El umbelico del Mondo

Today I drove from Lisbon to Coimbra via Almourol (a very interesting castle of the Knights of the Temple), Abrantes (a village in Ribatejo which looks like any other village), Vila de Rei and Lousã. I stopped at the geodesical centre of Portugal, which you can see above. The big pilar is the first geodesic mark, marking the first starting point of mapping portugal. It was discovered heroically in 18something. Thank god it was on a hill, else the triangulation would have been tiresome....

The little pilar in front is the geodesic mark TF4, which marks todays starting point of triangulation. At this place next to Vila de Rei there is the most wimpy museum I ever visited (it's for free, else I would be annoyed...). The only things on exhibition are a theodolite, a leveler and a computer with a GPS from Leica. Together with 4 posters on Geodesy, this is the whole museum... If it wouldn't be for the cafeteria, this would loose any reason for existence.

I'm Leaving on a Jet plane

Plane
Originally uploaded by perreira.

Don't know when I will be back again...

Actually I do, 4th of september. But I'll be gone nonetheless for the next four weeks. I won't respond to mails, if not considered important (important in this case means either from good looking girls or telling that the detector has blown up (in the second case the answer will be "Yooohoooo"...))

I may post some stuff here and put photos on flickr... But I am on holiday, so I will keep my contact to the internet to a minimum.

Photo stuff

Schloss
Originally uploaded by perreira.

I just bought a new lense: the Sigma 10-20 DC EX. Finally a decent wide angle... Although it looks like it is not very sharp at the edges, but this might also be an effect of wrong focussing...

And I started to geotag my pictures on flickr, so you can see where I have been when I took them. (You might want to check out flyr or Yuan.cc to look for geotagged photos and the flickr geotagging group for what's this all about)