Category: algarving

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algarving weeknotes

weeknotes, 37/24

the boy went to faro to pick up his shot and had the 5th dose. this time, they let him bring 2 of them home, instead of one. his eosinophil count is still low, and the only symptoms he has these days are just sneezes and a clogged nose when waking up. hurray!

this week was spent with the parents, eating mom’s food and letting dad fix all the little things that need fixing around the house. when they left on friday, the summer season was officially closed for us. :)

we started watching brooklyn 99, after our friends’ recommended it. we’ve only watched a few episodes so far, but it reminds us of community in its silliness. and i finished reading all systems red, the first of the murderbot diaries. it was short and sweet, and i enjoyed the read. looking forward to getting my hands on the rest of the series.

i rode my bike to cacela while the boy ran all the way there and back. the path is a little dodgy with loose gravel, but the view is still the best this side of algarve!

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algarving weeknotes

weeknotes 12/24

funny, how coming back home is strange in the way we just smoothly slip back into our routines, into the netflix series and songs we were obsessed with before we left — and into the worries too. it’s like taking a week off from life, and then coming back… but everything is still here, still the same.

the first half of the week was overwhelming. chinese classes are going well, but each 2-hour class requires another 2-3 hours of prepping in advance… and to do that twice per week gets really intense. so much so that i didn’t go to the pool at all this week. :( i need to be better at managing my time, the eternal struggle.

the skies have been yellow for days now, and a thin layer of dust makes everything a dull color. the air quality this week has been amazingly poor, and the wheezing boy has been safely hiding inside, blasting the air purifier all-day long. it looks like we’ll get some respite next week, and hopefully some rain too, to wash it all away.

because of insomnia, i finished reading bride (which was quite a bit more explicit than anticipated 😳), and also listening to an artist of the floating world (which featured more post-war political guilt than expected). we also watched a couple of movies, barbie and the man who knew infinity.

the boy found out about some guided tours in a local olive processing factory, and so we went to check it out. we were the only portuguese among all the americans and dutch doing the tour, but it was quite fun to see all the things that go into processing olives for consumption. plus, the tour guide (one of the workers there), besides being super knowledgeable, was really funny too! and at the end, there was a feast of olives for tasting, as well as bread and folar made by her mom. truly, a delight! i want to see it again, once the olive season is in full swing.

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algarving

PR13 LLE, serra e montes

this is what usually happens: i start the year filled with good intentions, and ready to keep good track of our hikes. then, i write about a couple of them, on the blog or on a notebook… but then life gets busy and i miss one or two, and it all goes downhill from there.

then one day, the weather is nice, we pick a trail to walk, and a few kms into it we notice a peculiar vase by the side of the road, or a house that looks vaguely familiar… and wait a minute, haven’t we been here before? 😅 of course we have.

this is the story of PR13 LLE, which circles around querença in 2 loops, one gentle first part and one in which you climb up and down and then cross the little river three times, stepping on the carefully put stones.

it’s nothing special perhaps, no sweeping views or exotic birds, but it’s still nice, with the almond trees doing their thing, the gurgling of the streams and the tilled olive fields that look like japanese zen gardens…

and then, out of nowhere, a pack of puppies spots you and comes running, demanding to be cuddled!

ahah, this was so much fun! 🥰 i’m very skittish around dogs on the hills, because they’re usually aggressive and bark at any stranger intruding on their territory… but these were such an unexpected pleasure. the highlight of the whole trail!

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algarving weeknotes

weeknotes, 47-48/22

– we took a couple of much needed days off these two weeks, to take care of some life admin stuff and christmas shopping (books for all the kids!). rest day included lunch in a new (to us) tasty thai place in town, and also brunch in a nice café. slowing down feels counter-intuitive and forced, but we need to relearn it slowly.

– visited faro for the annual christmas postcrossing meetup. it was great to see friends again, after 2 years away and catch up with them a bit… but i was exhausted by the end of it. it gave me the chance to do a bit of “#xtremedeltiology” too, which was fun.

– i finished the beautiful ballad for sophie, and also neil gaiman’s anansi boys, which was fun. at some point in the story, the narrator describes a group of flamingos as “a minefield of legs and necks”, and it’s just so perfect! i realized a bit late that this was the second book in a series… might have to go back and read the first one now.

– i’ve been rotating my swims with bike rides around the salt pans, in which i stop now and then to see some birds… at least, that is the idea. on one of the rides, the wind was unbelievably strong and i had to pedal so hard i hurt some tendon in my leg. and on another one, it had rained the previous day, and i really underestimated how much mud there would be… at some point, my bike was so crusted with mud that it just refused to continue. 😅

– it’s officially fireplace season, and i’ve sewn us a heavy curtain, to try and better trap the heat in the living room. it kind of works… but my toes and fingertips are still permanently frozen. :( sigh. the older i get, the more i dislike winter. please, someone teleport me to a warmer climate, or a country with efficiently heated houses.

– potatoes! paulo sent me down a rabbit hole of articles about a “potato diet“… and i promptly got obsessed with the idea of potatoes having some kind of metabolic superpower. i know it sounds weird… but i just cannot resist this kind of experiments, where you take one thing and run with it in the opposite direction of everyone else to test an hypothesis and see what happens. currently planning to eat about a third of our meals as potatoes until christmas, take notes and report back. i’m unreasonably excited about the prospect of more potatoes.

– and speaking of food, we stumbled on odeleite’s “brunch serrano” on the internet and had to check it out. the food offer was immense and to die for, from rabanadas to “migas” with pork meat, not to mention the warm bread and excellent jam. to repeat again soon, and bring friends! :D

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algarving

walking the marathon distance

for a while now, we’ve been following a youtube channel from a guy called beau miles. beau is very much into “backyard adventures”, a concept that i find fascinating — why do adventures need to be big and require huge planning and logistics? why do we feel like we need to go halfway across the country or the world in order to have an adventure, when there’s plenty of adventuring that can be had right around the corner? the pandemic made the whole idea seem even more attractive to me, and we ran with it… so to speak. more like we walked with it.

the goal of this adventure was to see if we could walk the marathon distance. turns out, between our town and the outer skirts of faro is a few meters over 42 kms on paper, so that seemed perfect — let’s walk to faro! the only issue with this plan is we were a bit short on daylight to complete the walk in december (which is when we did it), and the last stretch of it would be practically just walking on the road’s curb… which on the N125 means cars zooming by a couple of meters away at unsafe speeds. :( still, we decided to go for it, making up for the lack of daylight with an extra early wake up call.

which is perfect, because for me, the proper feeling of an adventure comes only if they start before the day dawns. so we got up really early, donned our little dorky headlamps and off we went through the salt ponds! the sun came up as we were reaching santa luzia and it was pretty magical to see. we sat down at a café there and had breakfast and a rest.

we repeated this walking + café breaks throughout the day, eating sandwiches and bolas de berlim, and powering through. many birds were spotted, conversations were had, new scenic spots were discovered that we want to go back to and check out again. walking is so easy, and yet so nice — just one foot in front of the other, again and again, until you get to where you’re going. i really enjoy the long walks, boring stretches and all.

blister packs are usually the thing that saves my poor little feet on long walks, but after so many kilometers, it would take a miracle to finish without any little pockets of pain. when we reached the train station in faro after many kms of walking, it felt like every little muscle hurt… but every little muscle was very happy too!

with this long walk, we’ve walked the portuguese coast all the way from vila real de santo antónio to faro and then from lagos to sagres, and from there turning north to porto covo, which is already a significant part of it! maybe one day we’ll continue the adventure and complete the walk all the way to caminha… that would be an adventure!