Packing up a caravan is something you get better at, and faster at, with every move. By this point in our journey we had a system — each belonging had its place, each cabinet had to be checked, each loose item secured before we pulled away. You learn this lesson the hard way the first time something slides off a shelf at speed on a winding road. It is not a pretty sight. We don't need to go into details.

The drive north from Geert's campsite took only an hour, but we stretched it deliberately — windows down, no rush, letting the landscape do what northern Portugal does best, which is make you feel quietly grateful to be alive and driving through it.

GarfePark — And the Man Who Would Become King

Our next campsite was GarfePark, and from the moment we pulled in we had that feeling — the good one, the one that tells you within about thirty seconds that you've landed somewhere right.

Green grass. A salt water pool. Shower facilities that were genuinely clean and well maintained. These things matter more than you might think when you've been living on the road for weeks.

At the entrance, the owner came out to greet us personally. His name was Arthur.

By the time we left, we had privately named him King Arthur — because that is exactly what he was. A gentle, gracious man who ran his little campsite kingdom with quiet dignity and genuine warmth. He showed us the available spots, helped us settle in, and made us feel immediately welcome without being intrusive about it. The best kind of host.

We chose our spot, and before we had finished unhooking the caravan the kids were already in the pool.

A Day at Home Base

The next day we declared a stay-home day, and those days had become as important to us as the adventure days.

I started with my morning workout — a non-negotiable by this point in the trip, my anchor to feeling like myself — followed by a well-earned coffee outside in the morning quiet. Then a supermarket run to restock the caravan cupboards and the tiny fridge that required us to shop little and often. The kids swam. They made friends with some dogs belonging to other visitors — fluffy, enthusiastic creatures who had no idea they were in a campsite and thought they were at a party. We cooked dinner. We went to bed happy and completely comfortable.

Some days the adventure is a waterfall hike. Some days it's a supermarket run and a dog you met in a campsite. Both count.

Gerês National Park — The Day We Found Out What We're Made Of

The following morning we drove up to Peneda-Gerês National Park — the only national park in Portugal, as it happens, and one of those places that makes you understand immediately why it has that status.

The drive up was breathtaking. We stopped multiple times — at the Cávado River dam, where the scale of it stops you in your tracks, and then at Lobo de Fafião, a lookout point partway up where an iron sculpture of a howling wolf stands at the edge of the road, looking out over the river valley far below. We stood next to it for a while. The view earned the stop completely.

We arrived at the park itself slightly later than was wise — mid-August, a Saturday, almost midday, blazing heat. The car parks were packed. The place was full of visitors who had arrived earlier and smarter than us, all heading to the same waterfalls and natural pools the park is famous for.

None of that stopped us.

The Climb Down — and Everything That Happened On It

We found a parking spot, and started making our way down toward the waterfalls.

I want to be honest about this trail: it was not a gentle stroll. The path was steep and rocky and narrow, the kind that requires you to actually pay attention to where you put your feet. Some sections needed proper negotiation — helping the kids up or down from rocks, picking the safest line across slippery patches where the waterfall mist had wet the stone. It was a real hike, not a signposted tourist walk.

And our kids were magnificent.

They didn't complain — not much, anyway, and given the conditions, a little complaining would have been entirely justified. They picked their way down carefully and bravely, balancing themselves through the steep sections, helping each other where it got tricky. I watched them and felt that particular kind of parental pride that isn't about achievement so much as character. This trip was making them into something. We could see it happening in real time.

At the bottom, we found it — the reward for all of it — a large natural pool fed by a tall waterfall pouring cold mountain water straight down into it. Around us, dozens of other people who had made the same journey sat on rocks, floated in the water, and ate snacks they had been sensible enough to bring.

We had brought no snacks. We had brought no swimsuits either. In our defense, we hadn't entirely planned to end up at the bottom of a waterfall trail on a hot Saturday in August.

The kids — already damp from various small slip-and-slide encounters with little pools on the way down, as was I — looked at the water and then looked at us.

I nodded.

They went in fully clothed. The water was absolutely freezing and completely perfect.

The Way Back Up

We stayed at the pool until hunger and tiredness started winning, then began the climb back. At this point the group split by strategy and energy levels.

Hagi and Adi chose the same rocky trail we'd come down — the proper way, the hard way.

The twins, soaking wet and gloriously exhausted, looked at the alternative: a wooden stairway leading directly back up to the car park. One euro each. The most efficient euro any of us spent in Portugal.

The twins changed into dry clothes (we always had emergency clothes in the trunk), snacked and resting by the car by the time Hagi and Adi appeared at the top of the trail a few minutes later. Nobody mentioned the staircase in a way that felt like defeat. It felt like wisdom.

A Few Things We Wish We'd Known Before Visiting Gerês

We went to Gerês knowing almost nothing about it beyond "waterfalls and national park." We came back wanting to return immediately and do it properly. Here's what we discovered — and what we'd tell anyone planning a visit:

It's Portugal's only national park. Established in 1971, covering 700 square Kilometers along the Spanish border. That alone tells you it's something special.

The Romans were here first. A first-century Roman road runs through the park — the Via Nova, connecting what is now Braga to Astorga in Spain. You can still walk sections of it and touch the original milestones. Two thousand years old and still there.

Wild horses roam freely. The Garranos — small, dark chestnut horses native to this region — live wild across the mountains. Spotting them on a drive through the park is one of those moments that stops you completely.

The Iberian wolf still lives here. Gerês is one of the last places in the world where you might — if you're very lucky and very quiet — catch a glimpse of one. We didn't. We're going back.

The waterfalls are the reason most people come — Portela do Homem, Tahiti, Pincães. Go early, go on a weekday if you can, and bring your swimsuit. Unlike us.

Home, Showers, and a Meal That Was Earned

We drove back to GarfePark with that specific tiredness that only comes from a day when you genuinely pushed yourselves — the good kind, the heavy-limbed, quietly proud kind.

Everyone got a long hot shower. The campsite's facilities, bless King Arthur and his standards, were exactly as good as they'd been when we arrived.

I cooked a late lunch — or an early dinner — packed with vegetables and protein, the kind of meal your body asks for after a day like that rather than the kind your brain usually wants. We ate outside, slowly, talking about the day we had. The valley was going golden in the late afternoon light.

There are days on a long trip that you know, while they're happening, that you'll still be talking about them years later. This was one of those days.

Our kids had climbed down a steep mountain trail, swam in a freezing waterfall pool in their clothes, climbed back up, and driven home happy. They were growing — visibly, measurably, in ways that had nothing to do with height. The harder the challenge, the more we could see what they were becoming.

We were all becoming something, on this road. We just didn't have the words for it yet.

King Arthur's campsite gave us exactly what we needed — a warm, gracious base from which to push ourselves and come back to recover. The north had one more surprise waiting for us before we turned the caravan south. And it would come in the form of something none of us expected: the edge of the country, the end of the road, and the moment the Atlantic told us in no uncertain terms exactly how small and exactly how alive we were.

Fun Fact

let’s talk about Bears

Brown bears used to live here. Not in some distant prehistoric past — in relatively recent history, these mountains were bear country. They disappeared from the Gerês region in the 17th century, but the very last bear in Portugal was killed right here in Gerês in 1843. Less than 200 years ago. Someone's great-great-grandmother was alive when Portugal had its last bear.

We walked those same trails, climbed those same rocks, stood under those same mountains — and tried to imagine them wild enough to hold something that large and that powerful. It wasn't hard. Gerês still feels like a place where anything could be hiding just beyond the treeline.

And here's the part that gives us genuine hope: in 2019, for the first time since 1843, a brown bear was confirmed in Portugal — spotted by a beekeeper in Montesinho after it damaged his beehives, most likely a young male wandering south from the growing bear population in Spain's Cantabrian Mountains.

He didn't stay. But he came. And the fact that he found his way here means the door isn't entirely closed.

Maybe one day the bears come back to Gerês. We like to think so.