Advertisement
Cleaning in salema
Claudia looks a bit animated here...but it was a infuriating situation! So we arrived back safely in Seville after Fes and jumped in the car to head for Salema, our next stop, in Portugal.
Salema was... a disappointment to say the least. The accommodation we booked turned out to be a huge letdown. Not only was the woman we had to deal, Fatima, a nightmare- -we called her an hour before we were to arrive only to be told to call her in a half hour, at which time she told us she was now in another town completely in the opposite direction and got mad and huffy with us that we had made good time on the road, then told us to find someone else to let us into our place in Salema, then disappeared for hours, then got annoyed when we couldn't find her, etc. etc-- but the place itself was disgusting and dirty when we arrived (because Fatima had not cleaned it). After a sold attempt at cleaning it ourselves, we gave up, and Colin phoned the owners in Lisbon and asked for our money back. To their credit, they were surprised and embarrassed and asked Fatima to deliver our money and let us leave (another pleasant encounter,
as you can imagine). Frustrated and hungry after hours of dealing with Fatima, we tried to find another place to stay, finally settled on a hotel, and got the hell out of Salema the next morning. We headed north and west to a surf town named Carrapateira, and stumbled across a village named Vilarinha on the way. Oddly enough, we realized this was a village we had considered staying in (literally, it was an entire village of about 8 places that had been bought and turned into house rentals by the same company) but the accommodation had seemed too expensive when we were researching the area. We then found the exact place we had wanted to stay all along, but no one was there to contact about availability. After trying to call the owners for hours, while looking at other places in Carrapateria, we were just about to give up when we stumbled past another lodge at the edge of town. This place happened to be owned by the same people we had been trying to contact all day and we were able to book at the place we wanted all along, but at a highly discounted price. DOUBLE WIN!
It was a wonderful house, and the best possible place I could have imagined to spend my birthday. Colin got terribly sick, unfortunately, and the weather turned, leaving us in a bit of a loop, but it still was a great place to hang out for several days. Once Colin was feeling better we explored a bit, and went to Sagres, the most western point in Europe, where Trevor got to surf, and the rest of us got to relax. Just as Colin got better, I got sick (of course!) and to be honest we are still fighting off the aftereffects.
We left the Algarve for Lisbon, where we had one last night with Trevor and Claudia in the Bairo Alto district before we sadly said goodbye to them, and continued north...
Advertisement
Tot: 0.114s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 14; qc: 51; dbt: 0.076s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Lori
non-member comment
This is why you guys go first....to map out the perfect vacation for me and Dave... so that we don't have to stay in the dirty places or have run ins with people like Fatima! ;-) Thanks LatCars! Hope you're both feeling better now! I love you guys and miss you lots! Loving your blog and pictures!!! xo L