The leisure hours of a software expert witness at trial are few. I did find time to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month by walking out of the war room and into Fort Worth’s Sundance Square for a September 21st event “Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month with a vibrant showcase of lowriders and culture.” Here are some photos.
If you thought that the hydraulics on an Airbus A380 were complex…
Medium format never dies…
Elizabeth Warren’s family made it down to the event:
It would be nice if gold wheels were a factory option for the Honda Odyssey:
If a minivan isn’t sufficiently stylish, even with gold wheels, here’s what I think is an early 1950s Chevrolet Suburban (it seems smaller than today’s behemoths):
I reminded the person carrying this bag that “The Latinx do it better” was the correct modern form:
Some elegance:
Ideas for next time we have the Honda Odyssey repainted:
ChatGPT says that the correct expression for the situation below is “Mejor tu hermana en un prostíbulo que tu hermano en una Honda.”
Sundance Square during the event:
Later that night…
There’s an It’s Sugar store half a block away for dancers who get tired. They feature some Tim Walz gummi candies:
And some Kamala Harris/Joe Biden/Whoever Is Running the Country Peace for Our Time gummi candies for sharing with Iranian, Lebanese, and Palestinian friends:
Circling back to the subject of lowriders, is there another car culture that has been created by an ethnic group? We could perhaps say that minivans are the apotheosis of white American culture. Now that a substantial percentage of Haiti’s former population lives here in the U.S. has a distinctive Haitian car culture developed? How about an Arab-American car culture in Dearborn, Michigan?
I’ve spent a few weeks in downtown Fort Worth, Texas recently. It’s a lively city center with visual art, music, outdoor events in Sundance Square, restaurants, etc. The terrain is well-suited to cycling and there is a bike share system with reasonably good coverage for places that a visitor might want to go. The ethnic mix reasonably reflects recent immigration trends. Spanish is commonly spoken and there are usually at least a few Arabic speakers out and about (the women covered in hijabs, at least). I’m not fitting in that well due to (a) lack of cowboy hat, and (b) saying “hello” to folks encountered while out walking (a sign of mental illness in any true city, but standard practice in our corner of Florida (pedestrians and drivers wave to each other in Abacoa, Jupiter as well if any kind of eye contact is made)).
Texas seems to be home, so to speak, to plenty of homeless people. Nothing like the zombie army you’d find in a California city, of course, but a shocking prevalence compared to suburban or small town Florida. I had remarked on this a few years ago to an Uber driver in Austin, Texas. He was from Afghanistan and I asked him what the situation in Kabul was. He explained that nobody was homeless in Afghanistan because relatives would take in and care for anyone who couldn’t take care of himself.
Outdoor maskers are uncommon in Fort Worth. It’s nothing like my recent stay in Sherman Oaks, California, where I needed to walk only 1 block from my hotel to meet an outdoor masker. However, 100 percent of the outdoor maskers that I’ve encountered in Fort Worth seem to be unhoused (formerly known as “homeless”). I don’t remember seeing unhoused people, even in California, wearing surgical masks prior to coronapanic. Why are the unhoused more enthusiastic today about the protective possibilities of a surgical mask than the general population is? (To be sure, only a small minority of the unhoused in Fort Worth wear masks.)
One of America’s greatest art museums, the Kimbell in Fort Worth, is showing seven enormous tapestries right now. These depict the Battle of Pavia (1525) and were made roughly 500 years ago from wool, silk, gold, and silver thread. Each one is about 30′ wide and 14′ high, perfect for the Palm Beach County starter home. The curators praise the human artists behind these works, but I’m wondering whether robots couldn’t do a better job in many ways and thus revive this form of art.
(If you miss them in Fort Worth, you can see them while stocking up on fentanyl in San Francisco beginning in October and eventually back at their home in Naples, Italy (leave everything that you value in the hotel safe!)). Here are a few photos to give you a sense of the scale and detail:
To revive the art form, a computer program would need to be able to take in multiple photographs (the typical tapestry shows multiple scenes), come up with a cartoon, and then pick fabric to match the colors in the underlying photographs. How could robots do a better job than humans? Robots have more patience than humans and could perhaps work at a higher resolution. We have a broader range of colors available with dyes and could also add plastic thread to the palette.
There are some companies that purport to make tapestry-like art from photographs, but they do it by printing rather than weaving.
What else did I see at the Kimbell? Readers would be disappointed if I didn’t provide a gift shop tour…
The building itself is a Louis Kahn-designed landmark:
The lighting was a bit dim, but I managed to capture a Follower of Science (concerned enough about SARS-CoV-2 to wear a mask, but not concerned enough about SARS-CoV-2 to shave his/her/zir/their beard):
The modern art museum across the street is also worthwhile and provides clear instructions for making your own $1 million artwork at home:
The Amon Carter Museum, famous for its collection of Remington and Russell, is a 5-minute walk away (might feel longer in the 100+ degree heat).
Texas is not as rich a location for the masketologist as California, New York, or Massachusetts, but I still managed to find people who have elected to do jobs that inevitably expose them to thousands of potentially infected humans per day and who attempt to avoid contracting a respiratory virus by wearing simple masks:
(Supposedly arrived from Vancouver by truck rather than in 10-minute hops from Tesla Supercharger to Tesla Supercharger.)
A couple of times, we walked by the Beechcraft Starship, in which high hopes, a proven Pratt engine, and Burt Rutan’s design genius worked together to produce something that was worth less than the two engines still in boxes from Pratt. Approach and arrival…
Wikipedia says that six were airworthy as of 2020. We went back to take another look towards sunset:
Some more fun Rutan stuff in the EAA Museum:
Here’s a Hawker Harrier derivative, still serving in the active duty U.S. Marine Corps (supposedly retiring next year):
Never forget Leonard v. Pepsico, Inc., in which a plaintiff attempted to take Pepsi up on an advertised offer for one of these not-to-easy-to-fly planes:
It was found that the advertisement featuring the jet did not constitute an offer under the Restatement (Second) of Contracts. … “The callow youth featured in the commercial is a highly improbable pilot, one who could barely be trusted with the keys to his parents’ car, much less the prized aircraft of the United States Marine Corps. … The teenager’s comment that flying a Harrier Jet to school ‘sure beats the bus’ evinces an improbably insouciant attitude toward the relative difficulty and danger of piloting a fighter plane in a residential area. … No school would provide landing space for a student’s fighter jet, or condone the disruption the jet’s use would cause. … In light of the Harrier Jet’s well-documented function in attacking and destroying surface and air targets, armed reconnaissance and air interdiction, and offensive and defensive anti-aircraft warfare, depiction of such a jet as a way to get to school in the morning is clearly not serious even if, as plaintiff contends, the jet is capable of being acquired ‘in a form that eliminates [its] potential for military use.'”
I’m not sure how to characterize this one:
American transportation then and now…
Dyke Delta “Whitehouse Limousine”:
Down to the basics:
A Rotax-powered helicopter (with T-bar cyclic):
A 1936 Stinson promoting the health benefits of a 5-cent Pepsi:
Adjusted for official CPI, that’s equivalent to $1.14 in today’s mini-dollars so you might say that Pepsi is cheaper because it is possible to buy a can at Walmart for less than $1.14. However, I think Pepsi in 1936 was likely served at a drugstore counter where people could socialize with friends and, therefore, the present-day comparable is perhaps what a soda would cost at a fast-food restaurant (though, of course, the modern soda is also much larger).
A scale replica of the P-38 by the Brown Arch:
If “buy a shotgun” doesn’t give you an adequate feeling of security, here’s the Home Defense Edition of the Cessna T-37… the A-37:
Oshkosh is more of a social gathering than a trade show, but people still ask “What did you see that was new?” Let’s get that out of the way, then….
Skyryse has a fly-by-wire system that can turn the $1 million Robinson R66 turbine-powered helicopter into a machine with at least some of the intelligence of a $500 drone. I booked and they confirmed via text an appointment to fly their simulator, but when I showed up they said that their schedule was full and sent me away without offering an alternative date-time. I hope that they’re better organized when dealing with the FAA certification authorities!
Champion resurrected what is apparently an old project: a bolt-on electronic magneto that is powered via the same mechanism that powers traditional failure-prone mechanical mags (Avweb). They’re saying that it will take two years to get it FAA-certified for four-cylinder engines and then an unspecified additional amount of time to get it certified for six-cylinder engines. We talked to another manufacturer who makes some stuff that you’d think would be straightforward and could earn a blanket approval for a wide range of airframes, but instead requires FAA approval on a per-airframe basis. “Each airframe takes at least six months,” the company’s chief engineer said, “and sometimes an employee tells us that he needs a signature from a more senior employee and, even though the senior employee isn’t doing any substantive review, that takes months.” EAA was so sure that something like this could never be developed that there isn’t any space for it on the Wall of Ignition in the museum:
Just in time for people who identify as “women” and sought-after minorities to have responded to the call for them to get into aviation, the airlines have almost completely stopped hiring. Quite a few had already committed to booths at Oshkosh so they were there to collect contact information for some future date. Due to the rich having gotten so much richer in the past few years, however, NetJets is an exception:
Speaking of celebrating “women”, we met a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who had flown F-4 Phantom jets (“with enough power, even a brick will fly”) onto aircraft carriers at 135 knots. His wife bravely sits right seat as he flies a simple piston-powered aircraft today. For her achievement as a passenger she was gifted with a “WomenVenture” T-shirt and invited to be honored in a dramatic photograph (note the B-52 in the background, which was a big hit with our kids):
The man who went through Marine Corps boot camp and then risked his life every time that he got anywhere near the F-4 received no T-shirt.
The former Confederate Air Force was at the KidVenture area to teach the young that women (WASP ferry pilots) and Black pilots (Tuskegee Airmen) “triumphed over adversity” (unlike Americans who fought in World War II and triumphed over Germany and Japan?):
What else happens at KidVenture? The little ones learn Air Traffic Control, soldering, riveting, etc.
Circling back to those who triumphed over adversity, “Women in Aerospace” are celebrated with a wall-sized poster in the EAA Museum and this was one of the first things that we saw on entering the grounds:
(EAA is passionate about the inclusion of “women”, but not passionate enough to build permanent restrooms around the event grounds and its campgrounds. So the core of EAA AirVenture will always be people who are happy to take care of themselves and their kids for an entire week while using outhouses. (See also U.S. airlines. They say that they want to recruit pilots identifying as “women” but won’t offer the out-and-back-live-at-home lifestyle that Ryanair offers. With the exception of Allegiant, they are limited to recruiting pilots who are happy to be away from their kids for 10-22 days per month.))
Speaking of the museum, if you want to know how I get defriended, here are a couple of images that I posted to Facebook with the captions “COVID-safe aviation” and “Democrats donated a model of Donald Trump’s design for Air Force One if he should be elected for a second term”:
We are informed that children are innocent and kind and become aggressive only after being corrupted by adults. Based on my discussions with children, if they ruled the world’s nations a lot more disputes would be resolved via strategic bombing. This was a great year at Oshkosh for bombers. World War II was represented with two of the two airworthy B-29s, one of the two airworthy Avro Lancasters, and multiple B-25s. The Cold War was represented by a B-52 and a B-1B flying over on a couple of days (triggered the Apple Watch to warn about damaging noise levels; maybe the software should be smart enough to cross-check with airshow NOTAMS?).
Boeing enabled the U.S. to destroy Germany and Japan and threaten Russia with an annihilation of the whole planet via the B-52. What’s the company up to now?
The Boeing Pavilion enabled visitors to design a livery. I did one that combines a rainbow, a trans triangle, and golden retriever fur:
The EAA Museum contains a good quote for why EAA matters:
Here were the primary T shirts of 2024:
The shirt that I wanted to buy, but couldn’t find, is this one from Chinese-owned Continental (on the back of a guy listening to a talk by Burt Rutan, which I’ll cover in a separate post):
At least some of the downtown areas of Milwaukee make for a nice stop on the way to or from EAA AirVenture. The Third Ward is a particularly well-done gentrification/re-purposing. If you do decide to make a stop, the Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE) is home to a four-story museum of paintings and sculpture of humans at work. The Grohmann Museum was funded by Eckhart Grohmann, whose family was expelled from Silesia at the end of World War II (a total of 15 million other ethnic Germans were killed or, with American approval, forcibly displaced).
The tour begins in the rooftop sculpture garden, which contains heroic bronzes:
Here’s a wider view:
Then one heads down a spiral staircase to the paintings and smaller statues:
Of course, this 2020 work titled “Corona” by Hans Dieter Tylle is my favorite:
(The artist is German so he doesn’t depict the hospital administrator billing Medicare $120,000 for putting the patient on a ventilator so that he can have a 90 percent chance of death instead of the 85 percent chance that he came into the hospital with.)
Here’s “The Tax Payer”, 1877, which was hung right next to “Corona”, a perfect juxtaposition for the U.S. system:
The museum reminds us that medical quackery didn’t start with coronapanic:
Grohmann attracted some criticism for including works celebrating Nazi construction and industrial achievements, e.g., the work below.
the most represented artist in the collection, Erich Mercker (1891-1973), was commissioned directly by Hitler’s government to create images of the Third Reich’s expanding infrastructure.
One of the 81 Mercker works in the collection shows laborers cutting stone bound for the Chancellery in Berlin, the Reich’s seat of power, and others depicting bridges of the Autobahn, one of Hitler’s proudest achievements.
At least two other artists represented in the collection also have Nazi ties.
Dr. Grohmann and colleagues told the critics to pound sand.
Here’s an oil painting of one of the world’s worst jobs, i.e., serving on HMS Resolutein the Arctic:
The ground floor contains some stained glass:
The museum features two works by Hunter Biden: “Tapping Slag” and “Hosing Down the Coke” (painted pseudonymously, apparently):
There’s a huge painting titled “After the Mine Accident” (Fernand Dresse) that reminds us that our modern society is built on people who are willing to put their very lives on the line:
At the opposite end of the spectrum… “The Electrician” (J.C. New, 1890):
Unlike any other art museum that I can remember visiting in the past 5 years, the bookstore is entirely free of books promoting art by members of victimhood groups and books about the 2SLGBTQQIA+ lifestyle. Does that mean that the entire building is free of Rainbow Flagism? No. The building also houses offices for humanities professors at the Milwaukee School of Engineering. Nearly all of these teachers have festooned their office doors with the sacred symbology. Here’s Candela Marini‘s door, for example.:
Note that the Duke graduate also promotes “End the War in Gaza”, end the investigation of whether residents of the U.S. are here without authorization (“End 287G“), and questioning the definition of “American”.
Are there any paintings that combine the faculty’s passion for Rainbow Flagism and the museum founder’s passion for productive achievement? Here’s one of the Norwegian Dawn, often tasked with cruising the Greek islands, under construction in Germany:
What’s missing from the museum? Asian art! Hokusai, for example, painted people at work:
And, of course, the Socialist nations made a lot of great art of people working. I didn’t see any Russian or Chinese 20th century paintings of the masses cheerfully toiling (for those who call today’s Democrats “socialist”, remember that relaxing on what used to be called “welfare” was illegal in the Soviet Union; the correct adjective for Tim Walz (still struggling with PTSD after a taxpayer-funded trip to Italy) or Kamala Harris is “transferist“).
If you’re heading to or from EAA AirVenture, here’s an idea for a stop: the Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee. This is a report on our July 2024 visit. The museum is close to downtown Milwaukee, not right next to the factory as you might expect (the factory is about 15 minutes out of Milwaukee; tours were shut down due to coronapanic and, as of July 2024, hadn’t reopened). I was disappointed to see the “CAR Parking” sign rather than “CAGE Parking”:
Some guys at the entrance apparently interpret “riding bitch” literally:
A few things that I learned at the museum:
Harley-Davidson has a long tradition in motorcycle racing, though of course these days Honda is the leader
Harley-Davidson has made various forays into diversification. These have included scooters, golf carts, boats(!), and snowmobiles
There never were any motorcycle gangs, but there were plenty of female riders and businessmen organized into “motorcycle clubs” (the gift shop doesn’t sell “one percenter”, “Better your sister in a whorehouse than your brother on a Honda”, or “If you can read this it means that the bitch fell off” T-shirts)
Let’s check out the prices over time. In 1916, a hog could be purchased for $248 (about 7,500 Bidies when adjusted for official CPI):
The museum experience starts with a gallery of early Harleys and an explanation of how the engines have evolved over time:
If riding motorcycles wasn’t sufficiently hazardous to your health you could puff cigarettes while riding into a war zone:
You could tumble over backwards on a hill climb:
Here is what a gathering of motorcycle owners looks like, according to Harley:
Harley tried diversity, but it didn’t turn out to be their strength (as with Intel and the 21st century UK?)
Old meets new (gas vs. electric):
It’s an interesting two-hour experience even if you’re not a motorcycle rider.
That last of a multi-part series on our three-week June 2024 trip to Portugal (Lisbon and points north)…
The Porto airport is gleaming and quite efficient. Our passports were checked once during luggage check-in, once at an immigration barrier set up on the way to the gates that serve non-EU destinations, and once more at the gate. Except for the final check at the gate, this was all done without a wait on a Friday before a 9:00 am flight (might not have gone as well on a Sunday when the British are returning from their weekend escapes).
The check-in counters still have their Plexiglas coronapanic barriers and, as in Get Smart, humans respond in the predictable way of leaning to one side of it so that they’re able to hear each other:
To my delight, I found a handful of Scientists in the terminal, voluntarily packing themselves into 100-percent full airliners while relying on 3-cent masks to prevent becoming infected with a deadly aerosol virus. Here’s one in University of Virginia Statistics logo wear:
(And he/she/ze/they is wearing a murse?)
Here are a couple more:
The reintegration into a Rainbow-first society begins as soon as a passengers steps onto the United flight. The seatback video screen promotes exactly one class of movies to a passenger who doesn’t touch the screen and search by category:
The Out and Proud collection is all about “modern love”, so the child who views the screen might reasonably infer that a non-LGBTQ+ situation represented “obsolete love”. We landed and were greeted by a “masks mandatory” sign:
After nearly a one-hour wait to clear immigration, it was time for the kids to get a refresher on America’s state religion:
(As noted in a previous post, given that our passports were examined three times prior to departure by qualified Portuguese personnel, why can’t the U.S. just wave in anyone holding up a U.S. passport? That’s how it is done when people disembark a cruise ship in Miami. The U.S. immigration bureaucrats feel comfortable, apparently, relying on Royal Caribbean’s ability to keep track of passengers and their passports.)
We went to a secret restaurant in Newark that is reserved for at least moderately frequent United flyers. I told the kids to go into a public restaurant and tell the staff “We don’t want to eat here. We want to eat somewhere secret.” Everything was going smoothly until they noticed the CNN screen with the word “Trump” continuously displayed (see Do CNN viewers think that Donald Trump is a god? but it also might have been because we landed a day after the first Biden-Trump debate of the 2024 election). The 10-year-old asked me who I thought would win the election. I said that Donald Trump wasn’t my first choice among the Republicans and that it was impossible for me to predict how other Americans might vote, but Biden’s promises of student loan forgiveness and other free stuff was going to be very popular with many voters. (Whenever politics comes up, I remind them that people who situated differently will rationally vote differently and that, for example, their unionized public school teachers are almost certainly going to vote for Biden and they should respect that.) As I hadn’t sufficiently condemned Donald Trump, a couple of elite New Yorkers at a nearby table stepped in to tell the kids that Donald Trump was a convicted felon and that his crimes were too disgusting for them to even hear about (what is the right age for a child to learn about the world’s oldest profession and Donald Trump’s alleged customer status?) and that he was “a racist”. So the kids ended up learning quite a bit about the elite Democrat political faith just while changing planes (even the simplest mask can prevent respiratory virus infection; the Rainbow Flag worship, and the blind rage regarding Donald Trump).
Our Honda Odyssey was waiting for us in the PBI garage (somewhat more expensive than an Uber round-trip, but worth it, I felt, for the shade (our car would otherwise have been on the street or in our driveway)) and, unlike the Sixt rental Mercedes, started right up despite having sat for three weeks.
We got to the house around midnight Portugal time (same as London), but discovered that the upstairs A/C system had shut down. It had been professionally serviced three months earlier, but there was what looked like white jello growing in the condensate drain. I borrowed my engineer neighbor’s Shop Vac with custom PVC connector and managed to clear the clog. The next day… a second air handler shut down with the same issue. I vacuumed out all three lines (significant gunk and water from each) and scheduled an appointment with the professionals… I think what needs to be done in a compressed air/CO2/nitrogen blowout starting at the air handler every 3 months. Plus maybe an IV drip.
Ponte de Lima is on the way back from Santiago de Compostela. It’s notable for being one of the oldest towns in Portugal (the bridge goes back to Roman times, for example) and also for being one of the flattest that I found. If you’re tired of having to walk up and down hills just to go to the supermarket, this might be a worthy base of operations. Here’s what it looks like from across the Roman/Medieval eponymous bridge:
The town is part of the coastal Camino from Porto to Santiago de Compostela:
It looks like one can walk (or maybe also bike?) about 70 km on a trail along the riverbank. I found a sign indicating that the north bank path abeam the town was at km 21 of an “ecovia”:
The town has a lot of the usual good stuff of a Portuguese town, including an attractive main square and what looked like a lot of good restaurants. They were running, across the river, an international garden festival, and there was some sort of celebration (on a Monday afternoon) that required a marching band in town.
Speaking of town festivals, we arrived in Braga, Portugal’s 7th largest city, for the end of the annual São João de Braga festival. This has been going on for about 900 years, ever since the establishment of a church dedicated to St. John the Baptist.
The town has a famous cathedral, inside which I found some of the statues that had been carried in processions:
Braga’s star attraction is a 15-minute drive from the center: Sanctuary of Bom Jesus do Monte (a UNESCO World Heritage Site). Maybe it is my Jewish heritage, but I can’t figure out why a place would be named for “Good Jesus”. There is no Catholic group that believes in a “Bad Jesus”, right? You’ll want to park at (or Uber to) the top and walk down the stairs, then take the water-counterbalance-driven funicular up.
Side chapels as you walk down the stairs depict events towards the end of Jesus’s life:
There is a beautiful garden above the sanctuary. Just walk uphill.
Braga is nice, but it wasn’t our favorite overnight stop. The pedestrian streets downtown would be great for meeting up with friends and hanging out, but we didn’t have any friends. Braga does have what I think is a private celebration of progressive causes, e.g., Interseccionalidade and Free Palestine:
After two nights in town, we drove out via a beautiful McDonald’s that was absolutely empty for breakfast (possibly just a single lady working). The Portuguese have yet to adopt American breakfast customs, apparently.
We returned out rental Mercedes at Sixt by the Porto airport (mournful saga) and Ubered to downtown. Maybe we’d been spoiled by our time in the Portuguese mountains, but the old town seemed absolutely overrun with tourists. Here’s the train station with its famous tile art:
Would you like to go to a bookstore that inspired J.K. Rowling? Here’s what Livraria Lello looks like inside (Wikipedia):
You’ll need to pay between 8 and 45 euros online, however, and then wait in line for a while before you can begin your shopping process. Here’s what the line looked at around noon on a weekday:
Note that the infamous TERF herself says that she never went to this bookstore, but is someone who denies the miracle of gender transformation a credible source on any subject?
There’s an important church nearby. Here’s the line to get into that one…
Keep in mind that we were there in June and the peak tourist season is July-August. Locals said that the crowds would get much much worse. We found a good escape in the Serralves Foundation, a huge hilly garden (walk down; elevator up) with a contemporary art museum in a residential area. Once you’re there, it is a 30-minute walk or quick Uber ride to the mouth of the Douro River. This is a high quality beach by European standards, though the water is much too rough and/or cold by Florida standards.
We finished our trip with the classic Francesinha dish:
We could have had a second one for breakfast at the airport (well, maybe they don’t serve it all day, despite the name):
We arrived in what barely seemed like a village, Campo do Gerês, and stayed a few nights to walk in the surrounding mountains. The highlight of my trip, of course, was a visit to the town of Covide:
The weirdly narrow “house” is for storing grain safe from animals. Here’s the local cemetery:
It was in Covide that we found walking paths down which Google Maps tried to send us in the Mercedes E class. It was also there that we found a car with a great design for Europe’s ridiculously narrow and nonstandard roads:
The Citroen Cactus has Airbumps that can be sacrificed in the event of a scrape. Both Covide and Campo do Gerês are on the Caminho da Geira e dos Arrieiros, a 239 km route from Braga, Portugal to Santiago de Compostela.
Even if this path coincides with roads for cars, it’s likely hilly everywhere. The 28 km stretch above is particularly worrisome!
Campo do Gerês has a good museum on the Roman history of the area.
We did see some old Roman road sections and also columns in various places nearby.
There is a lot of good hiking and, for those who don’t mind cold water, swimming, around and in the reservoir impounded by the Vilarinho das Furnas Dam.
There is one hotel in Campo do Gerês, which has a good restaurant, and there are quite a few campgrounds and AirBnBs. The unpaved road alongside the reservoir has an excellent surface and is a good way to get to the border with Spain (a derelict unstaffed crossing).
