Lagos - from the back of our scooters.

Lagos has been pretty ridiculous. Not unlike Barcelona, it's light on history, but heavy with natural beauty and fun. Lagos is a city located in the algarve reigon of portugal, which is the southern most part. A touristy town that increases it's population 10x when summer hits, and dwindles back down to 20 000 during the off season. This goes without saying, thank god it's off season.

We're staying in a hostel called the rising cock hostel. Seriously, that's actually its name. It's run by a women named Maria, but she insists that everyone call her mama. Which we all do. The place is filled with a mix of Australians and Canadians. Which sets the tone really well, everyone seems to be into it for fun and enjoying Lagos. It's easy to get stuck here, we've run into way too many people who said they planned for a 3-4 night stay, but they're narrowing in on their 3rd week. I however, really enjoy lagos, but i don't think i'll get stuck here too long. I think i'll leave for tommorow for Seville. But that all depends on how proactive i feel tommorow.

Enough of the prelude and on to whats been fun.

Renting Scooters -- Quite possibly one the Worst and Best decisions of my life.

It all starts at the scooter place. 20 euro for a 24 hour rental, plus 100 euro deposit. Reasonable if you ask me, so we rented. Devon and Chris got stuck with a 2 person scooter because they were all out of singles. This turned out to be a blessing because chris couldn't drive the scooters. He tried, really hard. He failed the driving test which consisted of two very difficult elements of scootering...starting and stopping. It's funny, but hats off to him for openly admitting he couldn't do it. We were joined by some guys we met earlier that week named Paul, Dan, Adam and Lauren. Dan's a crazy bastard, but we didn't know that at the time.

After gassin' up at the gas station (a total of 2 euro's) we headed towards a town called Sagres. Sagres is a fortress town, but more importantly it has one insane beach. We had intentions of seeing the entire town but "wasted" the whole day at the beach. Sagres is 32 km away from Lagos so it took us a fair amount of time to get there going around 50km/h. Once at the beach, we were witness to one of the most picturesque beaches i've ever seen. So naturally, given the pace of the day, we drove our scooters onto the beach. Against our better judgement. Insane surf and warm water quickly made it's way towards our scooters, where we were forced to pull them up higher.

Way too much time was spent on that beach.

On our way back Chris took one more shot at the scooters. Five seconds into his efforts the scooter was laying on the rocks, making strange noises and shooting a lot of rubble. Chris then vowed to never drive again.

To convey the time frame of the day, we left at approximately 430pm. It gets dark at 6. We stopped at a restaurant on the way home and had a quick beer for an hour or so...by this time it was dark. And freezing.

Interjection - Portugal is like the desert, it gets freezing at night. "Freezing" is of course a relavent term, it drops to around 8-12 degrees at night.

Which we of course had no idea was going to happen, needless to say the 30 minute drive home in t-shirts and shorts driving at around 50km was FREEZING. Fortunetly i was driving with chris on the back of the double scooter, so he was there to hold me tight around my chest in the most homosexual of ways. Fortunetly for my social life, there are no pictures.

On the way back we picked up vegetables, chicken and potatoes. Once home cooked up a fiest. Had a perfect time and headed to the three monkeys bar. All tolled that day was one of the best days i've had this trip.

Turns out that while i was at the bar, i had let a guy named Bevon borrow my scooter. I have no recollection of this, but either way he broke the tail light off my scooter...whats worse is no one decided to tell me that he did this, so when i returned my scooter and the guy said "we have a slight" problem...I laughed. "He laughed?" your asking yourself...yes i laughed.

I laughed because earlier that day devon had crashed his scooter into a van and scratched the scooter from end to end. It was in a public area so he quickly picked the scooter up and drove off. So when the scooter guy said "we have a slight problem" i thought he was going to tell Devon that he noticed the scratch. This was not the case. Turns out Devon strategically placed his bike so that unless you looked hard, you couldn't see the scratches. I on the other hand, parked my scoot in plain sight...so that the broken tail light was glaringly obvious. After a heated arguement with the gentlemen i ended up paying only for the damages, which was 15 euro's.

Since then we've been taking it pretty easy. A couple of decent nights, a ton of late mornings. Some decent feeds on the balcony and decent times just watching tv on the couch. Portugals been fun, too much fun in some respects. But i think it's time to move on. I'm thinking Sevilla for now, then onto Grenada to hopefully end up in Morroco. But it's all
speculation right now.

I guess i'll see where i end up in a couple days.

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