Today it will be a shorter post: a travel funfact. I choose a picture and tell you about the story behind this picture. I take you behind the scenes. It’s the first post from this category, but I hope you will like it, because I have more planned !

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Let’s start with some background

This picture was taken during our trip in a van. It was last year, around the same time of the year. By the way I take this chance to tell you that if you didn’t liked the Martyn Photography Facebook page, today is the perfect day to do so ! We are publishing our best shots from last year’s trip, one pic a day !

So we left between March and April in a van. We didn’t have a lot of comfort in our van. To sum it up, we had a bed, a kitchen area (meaning a camping stove), a large water jerrycan and a battery. Not the five star hostel, but enough for our needs ! Our goal for this trip ? Go to bed every night with a different sunset, wake up every morning with a new sunrise.

Photographer’s honey moon

This trip was our honey moon. Indeed, it’s thanks to our wedding guest’s generosity that we bought our van. And we didn’t do the traditional honey moon travel after our wedding. So this trip was our honey moon. We originally planned a Europe tour, but something happened (I might tell you about it in a future post) and we ended up with way more time than planned. So we decided to travel through Spain and Portugal, taking our time alongside the coast, instead of hurry up and check more countries.

As we were starting our new life as professional photographers at that time, we took this opportunity to take a lot of pictures, to get better at photography, of course, but also to have some content to share on our Facebook page.

The story behind the picture

We arrived alongside the Aveiro river, in Portugal, to take pictures of the famous fishermen boats from this area. The river was close to the see, so it was affected by the tide. Despite my experience with tides (my grand-parents are shore-fishing enthusiasts, so I went with them a fair amount of times in my life), we almost got caught like newbies.

We found a spot where the floor was flat, with a direct view on the water, but protected from the road by high vegetation. The ground was dry, with some tyre marks, witnessing that it was safe to drive on. We had a look before settling down at where the previous high tide rised. We checked on the internet the difference between the previous tide and the one to come. There were 30 cm more. We then estimated it was safe to settle down there for the night.

Before going to sleep, Xavier had left his shoes outside the vehicle. They were still wet from a wave attacking him a couple of days before. From this trip on, Xavier is forbidden to check for the tide himself. He somehow always gets it wrong, so I am now in charge. Otherwise I’ll find him drawn one day. Anyway, when we woke up, his shoes moved from where they were left. The water carried them away, a few meters from where we were. We could even see the mark left by the water on the van’s tyres, right where the wheel trims start. If the water rose slightly more, we would have ended up in the river ! The fishermen would probably have found this funny, and our adventure would have stopped right there.

A few shots from this spot

Because even though there is often one or two pictures only from a single spot that gets picked and showed around, we usually take a lot more ! Here is a small sample of the pictures taken at this spot, alongside the Alveiro river in Portugal, during our vanlife trip.