The Scots have a word, "drrechh" (phonetic approximation) to sum up a day dark, dreary, gray, wet and chill. NOT that I personally have anything against that sort of weather, (especially if sitting by my own fire place) but it's frankly less than uplifting if you're traipsing around a strange city. And given that it was mid-October, a certain increase in drrechh-ness is only to be expected.
We had a good six weeks in the UK but under the circumstances it seemed that the most reasonable thing to do was......go to Portugal.
The cheapest way to get from Glasgow to Portugal, when you want to go three days hence, is to get out your IPad and book a flight on Jet2.com. That's what the landlady in Inverness told me as she bustled in and out of the breakfast room with plates of eggs and racks of cold toast. ( cold toast? Why?) She flies Jet2 twice a year. Next time she's going to Majorca.
Jet2.com turns out to be not just a website but an airline that exists exclusively to fly planeloads of Brits to beaches on package tours. And when we landed in Faro, Portugal, they all walked off the plane, through the airport and on to buses that drove them off to resorts where they can order fish and chips and a pint in English and lie on the beach and burn their fair, Northern flesh.
And that left two Americans and a South African (who was lugging a bicycle in a box, a surf board, and a surfboard carrier for the bike) ... That left us waiting to catch the public bus into the little town of Faro.
Faro ( and neighboring Olhao where these pictures were actually taken) turned out to be nice little towns where people get on with life. There is minimum tourist impact, a small port and an old town with some Moorish features. And a nice Welcome to Portugal.
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