July 24, 2007 but making up for a missed yesterday

Yesterday was a travel day, and we have come to the conclusion that we want to change around the itinerary to shorten the travel days, even if we have to miss some of the places we see. Just to give you an idea of how taxing a travel day is (sorry, I know most of you are working today)…. We had to set a wake-up call for 7:00 am the night before with the elderly desk clerk that speaks NO English. We wrote a note out for him exactly like this: “7:45 Taxi Bus Station”. Perhaps it was the English, or maybe he is a slow reader anyway, but he read everything out loud very slowly. Pardon the butchered Portuguese, but it went something like this (read slowly for best effect): si-en-te-quat-ro-cin-co-tax-ie-o-k-tax-ie-bus?-aut-o-bus?o-k-aut-o-bus-sta-shun?-es-sta-she-on?o-k-o-k. However, it did not end there. He became quite insistent, using sign language to mimic our sleeping selves and a pretend telephone to his head and dialing to mimic himself calling us, to make sure that we understood he would wake us up. Little does he realize that Americans over the age of forty go to bed at 10:00 and are more than awake at 7:00. Nevertheless, we agreed to the call and wrote down 7:00 on his piece of paper. True to his promise, we were called promptly at 7:00. He had also promised more to us, something about coffee (café) which we had agreed to, hoping it meant they would open the breakfast room early (normal hours being 8:00 to 10:00) for us. As it worked out, we got to the front desk at 7:30 to check out and spent the next ten minutes trying unsuccessfully to get any one of our numerous credit cards to work in his machine to pay for our room. After admitting defeat and giving us some explanation that was totally lost on us, we started counting up our cash to conclude that we were twenty Euros short of two nights fare. While Mike walked to the ATM in the town plaza to get some more cash, Deanne walked the suitcases down the two flights of stairs to stack at the front door. All of this was done as fast as possible in expectation that the taxi would arrive momentarily. When Mike returned and paid for our room, our friendly clerk insisted we sit and eat some breakfast where he had indeed arranged for us to have breakfast early. As we sat down to inhale some food (if we missed the 8:30 bus we were stuck until 1:30 for the next one) we watched him call the cab. After chowing down and wrapping up a ham and cheese on a roll to go, we successfully made it to the bus station and boarded our bus for the five hour trip to the Algarve region in Southern Spain.

The southern coast of Portugal appears to be the spot for vacationing Europeans. After quiet little Evora we were surprised to see these crowded beach towns all lined up along the coast. Our bus wound through many of the towns until arriving in Faro, the largest of them. After a two hour wait in Faro, and a delicious lunch at Mickey D’s, we caught the next bus East to the town of our hotel, Tavira. Some of the towns were modern resort towns reminding us of Palm Springs, with beautiful golf courses and condos lining the greens. Other towns looked a little like Laguna Beach, small shops and small expensive homes all crowded into the strip of land close to the beach. Faro was a mixture of old town (really old, walled castle town) filled with worn down apartments and beach condos. Tavira is one of the Eastern most towns, very close to the Spanish border. It is less developed than towns we passed through, still full of olive trees and orange groves. We finally arrived in town about 4:00 to find out after waiting in the information line that our hotel was 5 km further. Apparently the place to find a cab was the town square where we hiked next. After pacing awhile and waiting for a cab to show up, Mike charmed the lady pharmacist in the town square to call a cab for us.

By 5:00PM, a full day’s travel behind us, we arrived at our hotel, a Eurotel hotel. It is a disappointment, neither close to the beach nor charming. It is instead, in Mike’s words, “a huge European Motel 6” remote from town and from the beach. As in all of our previous hotels (except the Hilton in Rome), most of the guests are European and we have no fellow Americans within earshot. Our room is huge, with two side-by-side twin beds in built-in wooden racks, about three inches apart from each other. The air-conditioning is strong and loud and quite effective, requiring extra blankets during the night. Our hotel is so far from everything else, that a cab was required to get dinner unless we wanted the fixed menu dinner offered by the hotel. Neither of us were intrigued by the posted menu, deciding instead to eat in our room. Our only remaining food item (we ate our orange on the bus) was a half box of honey nut cheerios which Mike purchased a few days ago thinking they were regular cheerios (missing the only possible non-Portuguese clue to their identity- the honeybee picture). So, we dined on dry Cheerios, went down to the bar for a night-cap of diet coke, worked on the lobby computer for an hour to check e-mail and cancel a few reservations for future hotels based on our decision to travel lesser distances on our travel days, then went to bed (s).

This morning, after a cold and frosty air conditioned night, we decided to do laundry. After a week on the road we were both down to the final assembled outfits and projected a difficult day tomorrow without clean reinforcements. At each hotel so far we had inquired at check-in about laundry facilities and learned that there appear to be no self service laundries in all of Portugal. Undaunted at the thought of hand-washing, and not willing to blow part of our budget on 2 Euro laundering per shirt, we rolled up our sleeves at took turns at the bathroom sink. We had brought along 100 feet of nylon rope (doesn’t everybody travel with rope?) so Mike rigged up a clothes line in the bathroom that zigged from the towel bar to a hook on the shower wall and over to another towel bar beside the sink. When we went to bed last night our “whites” were drying, and during the night we wound our way through the ghostly hanging shirts and undies to the toilet. This morning we put away the dry clothes and rehung out handy line out on the porch, putting those still damp thick socks outside and adding to them all of the rest of our newly cleaned laundry. We are about to catch a bus into town, hoping that the laundry hasn’t blown away in our absence. More to come on laundry.

Okay, that was 10:00 AM and now it is 6PM. I can report that the laundry dried successfully and without blowing away. I would have posted a photo, but we didn’t want to air our clean laundry to all our family and friends.

We enjoyed a warm beach day today by taking the shuttle into the town with a shopping list and a plan to take a leisurely lunch. We strolled through town and found everything on our shopping list including the toughest item, a SIM card to enable Mike’s mobile phone to take and make calls from Portugal. We now have that card and have tried unsuccessfully to call Caitie. Maybe later. We also bought another English paperback book, which at 11 Euros ($15) a piece we buy as joint investments, with both of us taking a turn reading it before leaving in our hotel room or donating to those rare English speaking people we meet. We visited the farmer’s market (Municipal Mercado) and bought bread (pau), fruit, ham and cashews for our dinner. It is becoming our staple (when we aren’t pigging out on Cheerios). Finally we found a Portugal travel guide in English, which we expect will help us find our way around better. Our lunch was spent sitting under some umbrellas in the town square eating a bad hamburger (Mike’s advice to all of you is to only eat your burgers at Mickey D’s when in Portugal) and a delicious, crusty toasted cheese and onion sandwich (Deanne’s worldwide staple sandwich) After returning to the hotel, we spent the afternoon at the hotel pool buried in our UV protective clothing hiding under an umbrella.

Tomorrow’s hotel is supposed to have free wifi, so hopefully we will be able to post all of this. Until then….