We’ve moved again—this time we’re in Evora, which is about ninety minutes east of Lisbon. It sounds like we’ll stay in Evora for two or maybe even three days as the drive to the Algarve won’t be happening, which is almost a relief. Everything we’ve heard is that the Algarve is like Spain’s Costa del Sol, which means tourist central, criminally tiny bathing suits, and high-rise resorts. No thanks.

The last 48 hours have been spent struggling with a fundamental human need—laundry. Apparently, Portugal has no coin-op laundromats. You know, the ones that cost $1 for a wash, $1 for a dry and you end up spending more time than money. Yeah, they don’t have those here. They have dry cleaners and “self-service” laundromats, where self-service apparently means dropping your clothes off for someone to wash and return to you six hours later. For much more than $1 a wash, $1 a dry.

This threw a serious kink into the plan. We landed in Coimbra on Saturday afternoon and as well all know the continent closes for Sunday, which meant yesterday was spent strolling and lounging, since the “self-service” place was closed up too. No problem, we think. We’ll crank it out in a couple hours and be out of town by 10:00 Monday morning.

Yeah, no. Still refusing to believe that coin-op washers don’t exist in the country, we press on hoping to find one on our travels. No such luck. We ended up rolling into Evora at 6:45 and having to run on cobbled streets (harder than it sounds, especially in sandals) with backpacks and a plastic bag full of dirty clothes to get to their laundromat before it closed, only to find out it’s going to cost us about $30 to get our stuff washed. Perfect!

We’re no strangers to doing laundry in the sink, as we did that for six weeks on our last trip—I think I went with three t-shirts and three pairs of undies, so I am very familiar with doing laundry in the sink, thank you very much. It’s just that we decided that we’d do laundry at a laundromat at the end of the first week. Finding out that laundromats don’t exist in the country necessarily complicated the matter. And no mention of it in the guide books? Rick Steves, WTF?

Coimbra was a nice little town although almost everything was closed. It’s a college town but school’s out of session and we hit it on a Sunday, which means it was pretty sleepy. We drove down the coast for awhile before heading inland to Evora, which I think I’m going to like. It’s an old, walled city and I jones for all things medieval. One of my favorite stops so far has been today’s afternoon excursion to Obidous, which looks like a tourist trap but is really a medieval city. So I had fun running the narrow ramparts, shooting phantom arrows into the countryside and pouring imaginary boiling oil on ghost attackers. Amy met me by the car.

So it’s a couple days in Evora and environs (lots of Roman and Moorish ruins in this part of the country—too bad no ruins of a Moorish laundromat…) and then another day around Lisbon. We might try to hit a bullfight just for the spectacle, or head out to the suburb of Sintra. Then it’s about 36 hours in Paris, and then home.

And what’s up with getting no love in the comments? Where are my peeps? It’s Monday and you’re at work, or maybe you’re retired and have even less of an excuse. Get on it, people.

I saw in the paper today only 18 days until the World Cup. The rest of the paper was, of course, written in gibberish. Locals here seem to think their boys have a shot at being world champions, but I can’t tell how many are serious…

Love to all, even the ones who don’t leave comments.