The Hairdressers' Convention

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I sleep restlessly. I spend a lot of the dark hours thinking about how I'm going to explain to the man at the rental car office how a concrete wall managed to run into the back of our car. Issy says there's only damage to the paint work, but I'm sure the rental car company will take a different view. The term "write off" is the one that most frequently comes to mind.

We set off towards Barcelona. The snow that had magically appeared yesterday morning and then just as magically disappeared within a couple of hours has now reappeared. At least we think it's reappeared; we're now finding it a bit hard to distinguish snow from clouds. It wasn't at all difficult yesterday when the sun was shining and the sky was all blue. I'm now starting to question my sanity. I think that maybe they do slip hallucinogens into the food here after all. I hope I don't start seeing pink unicorns in the middle of the road.

The speed limit on the freeway's a healthy 120 kilometres per hour, which is good because we're running short on time; I didn't realise that we were quite so far from Barcelona. The signs to the airport are excellent, but when we're nearly there the freeway suddenly splits into two, with one pair of lanes going to Terminal 1 and the other pair to Terminal 2. We don't know which terminal is ours and there's no time to check before we have to chose. I chose Terminal 2, and we soon find ourselves in an industrial wasteland; there is a runway out here, but it looks like it'd be lucky to be long enough to accommodate a cessna. Issy gets the documentation out and sure enough we're in the wrong place. We should have checked in by now, and I haven't even fronted the rental car company yet. I wonder how long that will take. I hope they don't decide to cart me off to the police station.

Rental car man surveys the damage. He asks us whether another car was involved, but Issy quickly volunteers that we backed into a concrete wall. At least she said "we". He tells me that I should have taken the full insurance cover option .... a bit late for that unhelpful piece of advice I would have thought. He tells me that he'll need to charge me several hundred Euro to get the damage repaired. He's actually very apologetic.

Our flight's delayed, which is probably a good thing; if it'd left on time we probably would have missed it. We arrive in Lisbon, and collect another rental car. It's a BMW. This is not good - I doubt repairs on this will come cheap if we manage to back it into something.

We do a complete lap of the airport before finding the road we're supposed to be on. We cross the spectacular six lane Vasco de Gama bridge across the Tagus River. We read that it was opened in 1998 and it's 12.3 kilometres long, which makes it the longest bridge in Europe.

It's a bit over 200 kilometres from Lisbon to the Algarve via a very impressive six lane motorway. A lot of it's supported on long viaduct structures that look like considerable feats of engineering. The quality of the road's even more surprising given that there seem to be virtually no towns or villages along the route; we almost feel like we're driving through outback Australia. The terrain's gently undulating with scattered trees and the occasional olive orchard and vineyard. There doesn't seem to be nearly enough going on out here to justify the expense of such a high standard road, which gets us wondering whether maybe the Roads Minister‘s got a weekender down here somewhere.

We arrive at our Albufeira hotel. We're very tired after a long day of travelling so we're happy to eat virtually anything as long as it comes with alcohol. We settle in on the hotel terrace, and enjoy a traditional Portuguese feast of nachos and hamburgers .... well we assume this must be traditional fare given that it's all that's on the menu ....

It's a bit hard not to notice a large party of English hairdressers here for some sort of anniversary celebration. They're all decked out in 1970s fancy dress. We hope they realise they're in fancy dress; if they don't, I think I'd be suggesting to their clients that maybe they should be looking elsewhere to get their hair styled. It's still early, but they're already getting rowdy, and I think the staff might be in for a long night.

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