Blogs from Albufeira, Algarve, Portugal, Europe - page 2

More than 2 weeks after my arrival, initially as a tourist (Residency Visa in process), I am starting this blog to help track my journey. My goal is to find an area I like well enough to make my home base to live or take other new adventures into Europe and perhaps Morocco. I left Sarasota on October 29, arrived October 30 in Faro the largest city in the Algarve District which is the entire southern coast. A travel note for any future visitors: Faro may be cheaper to fly into than Lisbon plus you either take a bus, train or car which is at least 3 1/2 hours best case plus all the time/$$ to get started. A mini-van shuttle is available (airport to nearest hotel only) for $14 Euros to Albufeira via "Best4U" orange ... read more

Part 2: 20 Km West of Albufeira to Dos Salgados Beaches/Dunes -Western Albufeira including the marina (pictures already posted in the first post) -Then to Salgados Beach and Bird Sanctuary (140 species including flamingos) I sent a couple hours here passing through residential agricultural communities and back to Albufeira From the beach you can see the white washed town of Armacao de Pera my next Air Bnb see posted picture which will be my gateway to visit famous coastal Benagil caves and small fishing villages of Carvoeiro (now a resort village) and Feraguda... read more

The massive seagulls are again causing mayhem at breakfast. One of them has hoed into someone's leftovers on a nearby table and there's now broken crockery and glassware all over the paving. Issy decides to have a domestic morning, so I set off in the car for Praia de Falesia beach, which is about five kilometres east of Santa Eulalia. I take some happy snaps from the tops of the cliffs. There are again signs everywhere warning that they're unstable and to stay well back away from the edge. They look stable enough to me, so I walk right up to the lip to get the best possible vantage point. As I lean forward I realise that I'm standing on an overhang of soft loose dirt; the real cliff face is about a metre behind me. ... read more

We sleep in and miss breakfast. The channels that our TV's been tuned into suggest that our hosts think we're Dutch. We settle in to watch a few minutes of "How I Met Your Mother". All the dialogue's been overdubbed, but the canned laughter seems to be the original. We've got very little idea what's going on, but we get the giggles watching familiar faces speaking a very unfamiliar language in equally unfamiliar voices. We wander through the hotel and try to get down onto the beach. Security's intense; all the doors and gates are locked. It feels like we're in jail, only with lots of swimming pools, bars and restaurants. Actually I suspect this is not really how it feels like to be in jail. It seems that we need to use our room key ... read more

This blog will be limited in narrative but focus on photographs. After the cauldron that was Sevilla at 45°c, arriving in Portugal's magnetic Algarve via a three hour coach ride and a hair-raising taxi ride to the Vila Gale Atlantico resort, ten minutes from Albufeira, we settled in to our top floor suite. A gentle breeze swept across our south-facing veranda as we looked down on orange coloured clay roofs covering the typically whitewashed homes below, most of them clearly high-end. We were mere minutes walk to the beach and an excellent supermarket. Our plans were to relax totally while leisurely taking in the joys of the Algarve and it's decidedly slower pace before heading north as far as the exciting and incredibly attractive city of Porto and later the capital, Lisboa (Lisbon) and much more ... read more