Farewell to the boat; hello Alvor

I won’t say we were glad to be leaving Lisbon, but we were thrilled to be leaving the boat (see extra). Cramped, damp, musty and depressing: but that’s enough about me.  The boat had been getting me down as well. We’d packed up early, showered in the Gulag Blockhouse, and got ourselves ready for the taxi pick up. The big question, though, was would the bloody thing turn up?
 
You’ll remember that we had tried to book a taxi to meet us at the airport: there, despite our being on time, the taxi driver had not shown – and our holiday started to the theme of increasingly snitty text messages to a very cool woman called Teresa Montez – or to the ChatGPT system she used to field calls. Once bitten, twice shy: we’d been in touch several times to confirm and received several messages from said TM that the driver would be there. Then, late last night, we’d had a message saying she hadn’t actually got a booking for us. Further investigation discovered that the booking we had made through booking.com had been split into two parts: the pick-up with Teresa Montez Travel (or not, as the case might be) and the return to the airport, where we were picking up our loan car, with a company called “Heycars”. I don’t know about you, but when booking taxis, subsequently finding out the name of the taxi firm with which you booked was “Heycars” does not fill me with confidence. Heycars? FFS. Who thinks of these names? It sounded like a cowboy outfit, possibly run by retired circus clowns. There might be a hole in the floor of the car through which his feet might fit, so he can run along in his clown-sized shoes, making “beep-beep” noises as other cars pass us by. I mean, really.
 
The pick-up was scheduled for 9:30, and by 9:25 I was fielding a large number of enquiries from the other two members of the travel party. Questions like: “are you sure he is going to turn up?” Actually, it wasn’t so much that I was fielding a large number of enquiries, more like I was fielding the same enquiry, delivered in several different ways, a large number of times. In the end, I left Mrs. Ottawacker and Ottawacker Jr. with the luggage and went “to make myself more visible” to the driver. At 9:29, I got a text from “Joni” saying he (or, I suppose, she) was stuck in traffic and would be 5-10 minutes late. At 9:32, Joni pulled into the dock area, apologising profusely for the lateness and saying he could make it up if we were pressed for time. There wasn’t a clown-sized shoe in sight. I said we weren’t getting a flight, just picking up a car, and he said he was very glad. Heycars: I never travel with anyone else.
 
Joni drove us to the airport, taking us through the streets of Belém and into Alcântara. I tried to make small talk with Joni, whose English didn’t seem to be the best – literally the first person I’d met who wasn’t perfectly fluent! – and in doing so, admired a bridge we were passing. “That’s not a bridge,” he said. “That’s an aqueduct. More specifically,” he said, “that’s the Aqueduto das Águas Livres.” Mentally revising my opinion of his English, I thought I’d blind him with my historical knowledge.
 
“Ah!” I said. “More evidence of the Romans.”
“The Romans?” he said. “No.”
“The Moors?” I asked.
“The Moors?” he said. “No.”
“…”
“It was built by the Portuguese,” he said. “It is a glorious example of Portuguese engineering. Note the pointed arches. It was built in the 18th century to bring water from Odivelas. Lisbon has never had enough water of its own. It’s always been a big problem.”
 
Joni’s English wasn’t poor, he just didn’t want to talk much. A rare trait in a taxi driver: Heycars, I tell you, it’s got it all.
 
Once at the airport, we found the car rental place, and picked up the car. It was a Kia. I was a little leery of it to start with – my previous experience of Kias was not good – but it came with its inbuilt GPS system, which was good, and meant Mrs. Ottawacker was off the hook for navigation. Or, at least, so she thought. Sadly, the car’s GPS was on some sort of serial delay, showing the roads we had to take about 15 seconds after we were supposed to take them. We made our way out of Lisbon rather gingerly. We found the E1 easily enough, and the A1 – although this meant retracing our roots as the sign for the A1 was past us before the GPS had started to announce the “turn”. Once we had figured that out, it was just a matter of using additional tools, such as a map, an atlas, road signs, the TripTiks we had printed out from the CAA, etc., and there were fewer mishaps. After a stop for lunch and a second stop for more lunch, we made it down to the Algarve in 2.5 hours or so. We’d taken a pre-paid toll service, as we didn’t have the time to spend travelling on smaller roads. In hindsight, that was a mistake. But that is the thing with hindsight. At least the toll roads were excellent and empty.
 
Anyway, Alvor welcomed us with open arms. We found the Pestana Alvor Atlântico quite easily, were welcomed by a smiling, friendly receptionist, and by 3.30pm we were installed in our room. We unpacked, either put things in a pile to dry/air or wash, and then decided we needed to do some shopping. Despite the fact I had managed to book us into a golf resort – I had already clocked some of the outlandish fashions, and just assumed there were a lot of Floridians in the neighbourhood – it was quiet and pleasant. The room wasn’t the biggest, but, of course, after the boat…
 
The resort had its own shop, which promised a variety of old food for only five times the price you would pay normally, so we bought a few essentials. Then, I remembered we had passed an Intermarché en route, and we made our way to it unerringly. There, I discovered Sagres beer at 1€ per litre, and wine at 3-5€ per bottle. They had steaks as thick as your thigh for 6€. Fresh fish, and vegetables and all the sort of things we had been trying to get hold of in Lisbon restaurants. I was beginning to think I might like the Algarve.
 
We came home, I cooked dinner, we played cards, then crawled into bed, where I had the rather strange experience of being able to stretch out.