And then it’s time to go …

It’s our last day..
and we’ve somehow filled it with next to nothing. Probably the sunniest day to date - the drifting shreds of cloud off the mountains didn’t survive long - so I spent the first hour or so reading/drifting off on a sun bed on our patio. After coffee I felt a swim was in order, somehow justifying the bringing of a swimsuit, and eventually stopped talking about it and did a few lengths of the deep pool in the garden.

Thus enlivened, I felt like lunch - not just cake, but soup and wonderful bread on the patio of another part of the Quinta - before returning to our room to start organising packing cubes. Later our friends arrived to relieve us of the bottle of gin (or what was left of it) and have a wander round our gardens with us. That’s where the blip comes from - a small selection from the amazing abundance. And I’ve not even added the sausage tree.

Now we’re just back from the parrot/macaw restaurant where we ate scabbard fish with boiled potatoes ( the thing to eat with fish here) and vegetables, drank our last bill-accompanying Madeira, and had handshakes and blessings all round as we left like the Queen of Sheba. Or not …

Blipping a selection of the amazing flowers and massive palm in the gardens of our hotel.