Already on the European mainland we realise how cosmic the roading system is compared to ours in NZ. We most often have “Avoid Toll Roads”, “Avoid Highways” enabled on our GPS’s so as to keep our ride to the back country and small villages. But often these roads criss-cross over and below the fast roads that most use so we see the engineering marvel that they are by passing under the viaducts and seeing the tunnel entrances way up in the hillsides far above the valleys we are traversing. And then now and again we jump on those roads ourselves in order to speed our transit – like the one in the north of Portugal the other day that had us moving through 7 tunnels one after another , each of 4 lanes. And at the end of that the toll was 2 Euro. That’s the other thing – the flash roads are all funded at least in part by tolls – which is a real pain when you’re on a motorcycle and it’s raining and there are 3 different ways the tolls are levied – electronic (easy we just dodge those), toll cards (we don’t have so have to find select a booth that takes Visa) and cash only (now where is my wallet, oh that’s right under3 layers of clothing).
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