This was a day of great highs and great lows, ultimately ending in a lot of frustration and an inability to publish a post I’d drafted early in the day . . .

We set off late morning from Chaves to take a look at this impressive palace, now a hotel.

This done, we continued down the N2 road heading for Regua and then a vineyard I’d read about in an El País article on this particular road: The N2 from Chaves flirts with motorways and bridges that cross rivers and ravines to enter the Douro Valley. The grandiloquent designation ‘Nacional’ clashes with the reality of a narrow road of curves and counter-curves, climbs and descents – obstacles that don’t prevent farmers planting vines which defy the law of gravity. In Régua, capital of the wine region, the temptation is to turn off towards Pinhão on the N222, said by some to be the most pleasant road on the planet. This winding road – running between the waters of the Douro and the slates of the vineyard terraces – has the curious ratio of ten seconds on a straight stretch for every one second on a curve.

Frankly, it was disappointingly unspectacular – and badly surfaced – until we got past Vila Real. The stretch from there down to Lamego was indeed beautiful. Our fotos don’t really do justice to the views.

Because we needed to backtrack to Vila Real to turn east to said vineyard, we decided after 15 minutes of stunning views to to turn back to Vila Real and to head for Sabrosa and O Pinhao, en route to the vineyard – called Wine & Soul. Cue more winding roads and spectacular views, as promised by El País.

Not long before O Pinhao, Google Maps directed us off the main road onto a narrow earth-and-stones track between granite walls. I assumed this was a shortcut between tarmacked roads and unwisely – stupidly? – decided to take it.

The 15-20 minute drive down the hillside to the vineyard was the hairiest of my life, involving a great deal of scraping of undercarriage on granite rocks and eventually a narrow (fenceless) stretch alongside a steep drop to the valley below, until we reached a cobbled road and then, finally, the road we should have come down, a few hundred metres from the vineyard. An examination of the car’s undercarriage suggested that – miraculously – no damage had been inflicted, apart from a few dents in the exhaust manifold and the protective plates.

Needless to day, it took a while for the adrenaline to stop flowing and we then proceeded to have a very pleasant 90 minute visit to the bodega of the vineyard.

Why Google should have sent me down a track challenging for a 4-wheel drive I can only guess at. Possibly because it was – ignoring all other considerations. – the shortest route that a computer could find. I’ve tried to find exactly which track we went down but, as you can see here, the terrain is riddled with them and I gave up on this.

After the bodega session, we drove for 3 hours on winding roads to Ciudad Rodrigo, arriving at 9.10, whereupon Google Maps lead us on a merry dance through the narrow streets of the old quarter for half an hour, until I parked up and made my way on foot to the hotel, after asking for directions 3 times.

The receptionist at the hotel was unable to give me a street map but when I asked how on earth we could get to the hotel, her (redundant) advice was not to use my satnav/GPS as ‘This will drive you crazy’. Or at least I should avoid using the hotel’s address and just search ‘the cathedral of Ciudad Rodrigo.’

Back – 10 minutes walk later – at the car, we did exactly that and were then lead on a second merry dance by Google outside the old quarter, until we eventually entered this at exactly the same point we’d done more than an hour previously – when Google had failed to tell us the hotel was 30m to our left and, instead, had taken us round and round in a maze of narrow, one-way streets.

We then discovered that the hotel lacked the parking I’d asked for and so I had to drive back out of the old quarter and park half a kilometre away.

The final blow of the day was an inability to publish my blog post, as the wifi in the hotel was so poor. But I guess I can’t blame this on Google.

As I said, a day of great highs and great lows.