My dear family & friends
We made it to Portugal in the end, but only just. We might have figured that there was going to be a problem given the severe weather warnings for England, but we crossed our fingers and started out for Luton Airport at 3AM one morning a week before Christmas. We drove into a blizzard on the M1 just past Northampton which turned the roads to slush and made driving conditions hazardous. We were glad to be in the CRV. The car was showered with bucket loads of water every time we passed an eighteen-wheeler truck, reducing visibility to near zero. We passed dozens of abandoned cars as we approached Luton Airport – their owners having decided to trust their feet rather than their cars. I found a space to park the car in a three foot snowdrift right at the entrance to the medium term parking lot where I had prepaid our parking for two weeks. I thought it was very lucky that we should get a parking so close to the entrance. It was only when we got back that I discovered that I had parked my car diagonally across several disabled parking bays. But so did a bunch of other people.
There was chaos in the departures hall with all the early flights already having been cancelled. We felt smug that our flight hadn’t been cancelled. Easyjet checked us in, and we passed security into the departure lounge. First we browsed around the shops and then we waited and waited. I took some pictures of aeroplanes covered in snow. (See pictures in the usual spot at http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/llewellynijones/.) I suppose I should have guessed there was a problem because there was absolutely no activity on the airport apron. But I didn’t. Eventually some snow ploughs and tractors came out to clear the apron and runways, and flights were called over the public address system. What I didn’t know was that the flights were being called so that people could go and fetch their luggage on the way to being told to fuck off. All the luggage was unloaded in the arrivals hall, flight by flight. I asked one Easyjet official why our flight had been bumped off the Departures Board, and the bastard lied to me. He said that our flight would be called shortly and that there was no problem. When I realised that there were no planes leaving, I persuaded Lucia to ask the same official what was going on. He told her that our flight had been cancelled. (So, why did the ineffable pratt lie to me and tell Lucia the truth?)
I sent a text message to Barbara & Terry in Portugal with the bad news, and we went to fetch our luggage in the arrivals hall and go back through passport control. Terry searched the Internet for alternative flights while we reclaimed our luggage. And this is where we got fucked. All Easyjet flights up to xmas were full because of the threatened strike by British Airways staff (which never materialised after BA had successfully applied for an injunction against the strike.) Easyjet simply ditched those customers whose flights had been cancelled. You could get a refund (with difficulty), but you were certainly not going to get to your destination on Easyjet before xmas. The best flights Terry could find were on Monarch Airlines from Birmingham to Faro the next morning. Lucia and I sat at Costa Coffee in the arrivals hall while I connected my computer to the Internet via my cellphone and booked the tickets from Birmingham (at great cost.)
We left my car at Luton (on the [correct] assumption that we would be able to drive home on our return) and caught the bus to Coventry, and then a train to Leamington Spa. We took a taxi home and arranged with the driver to pick us up at 4AM to take us to Birmingham Airport. And that’s how we eventually got to Portugal. It wasn’t cheap. I still don’t understand why Luton Airport got snowed in when Gatwick, Stansted and Heathrow managed to keep their runways open. I can tell you what I saw – and that is simply that the “workers” (fuckers) were doing nothing long after the snow had stopped. I wish a pox on them all.
While we cooled my our heels in Leamington Spa overnight, I tried to get a discount on the apartment we had booked in Lisbon given that we would only be spending two nights in the apartment rather than three. The agency, travellingtolisbon, wasn’t interested in my appeal. They didn’t seem to realise that we actually had a choice of whether to honour our reservation or not. I don’t understand why someone would risk losing a reservation and guaranteed payment because the rules say you can’t give a discount once the booking is made. They would rather have lost €200 than have kept a client. How do people get to be so dumb? We eventually decided that we would go to Lisbon for two of the nights we had booked because we really wanted to see the xmas lights. As for travellingtolisbon, they gave us a complimentary bottle of port and promised a 10% discount on our next reservation, but I won’t go back to them. Their efforts to lose a repeat customer were successful.
We landed in Faro a day late in bright sunshine with the temperature touching 20C. We shed layers of clothing on the bus between the aeroplane and the terminal while listening in to the chatter of our fellow travellers. One person wanted to know if she needed her passport to enter Portugal. She was completely serious. I suggested to Lucia (in Afrikaans) that such people should not be allowed to own a passport. In the queue for passport control another genius (who should never have been given a passport) told his family they had to join the “Other Passports” queue because the six “EU” queues were only for American citizens. I heard someone else suggest that the Portuguese must be Welsh because they were also Celts. I could only shake my head in horror.
When we emerged from baggage claim, Barbara and Terry whipped us off to Faro beach for coffee and medronho (meh-dron-yo), Algarvian firewater, and then to Loulé railway station for our journey to Lisbon. The apartment was well appointed with fantastic views (see pictures) over the old business district down to the Tagus and the great bridge of 25April. It used to be called the Salazar Bridge after the fascist dictator who ruled Portugal with an iron fist for nearly 50 years. We strolled around the old business district in the early evening gazing at the xmas lights. We decided that they were much better in 2006, the last time we were in Lisbon for xmas. But they were still good, much better than anything on offer in the UK. We ended the evening at a small family restaurant in the Bairro Alto (High District) sharing a bottle of red wine and some classic Portuguese dishes.
On Sunday morning we went to meet my sister, Barbara, whom we had persuaded to join us for a night in Lisbon, at Entrecampos railway station. We were nearly late because it was Sunday and all the ticket offices were closed and we had to use the Lisbon transport ticket machines. The machines had an English button, but it didn’t really help. I chose to use the Portuguese which I understood well enough. We chose our tickets and put €20 in the machine. The machine gave us our €20 back. Then I tried my credit card, but that wouldn’t work either. On closer inspection I eventually realised that the machines would only accept €10 notes and less. We didn’t have any €10 notes so we emptied our pockets and purses to harvest all the coins we had and only just made the fare with a few 10cent coins to spare.
We took Barbara back to the apartment (with which she was duly impressed) via a famous pastry shop, the Confeitaria Nacional. We absorbed the view from the apartment over pastries and coffee before heading out again in the late morning. We wound our way down to the riverfront and caught a tram to the old docks under the great bridge of 25April where we sipped at beers in the bright sunshine. We followed the riverside walk to Belém for more pastries and coffee, and then to famous Mosteiro dos Jerónimos for a xmas concert by Os Violinhos, The Little Violinists. The orchestra is made up of students from the Lisbon Academy of Music from around five to fourteen years old. You can be certain that many of them will be playing in the great orchestras of the world in a couple of years’ time. Like most concerts in Portugal, we had to put up with people walking around and making a noise, but it was fun anyway. Outside the monastery the bright sunshine had turned into a heavy downpour of rain and we had to run for cover at the tram stop. Back in the old business district we hugged the walls to avoid the pelting rain and made our way to dinner in the Bairro Alto again via a few tram journeys. After dinner we chose a taxi to take us back to the apartment rather than brave the rain again.
In the morning we checked out of the apartment and left our luggage with travellingtolisbon while we went exploring again. We visited Mae d'Agua first, the giant reservoir in the middle of Lisbon which sits at the end of the Águas Livres Aqueduct. The aqueduct was built in the mid-1700s to bring the city its first clean drinking water and, quite amazingly, survived the giant earthquake of 1755. From there we wondered through the Rato (rat) district to the park in Principe Real (for more coffee and firewater), before cutting through the Bairro Alto to an art and handicraft shop that Barbara had found in one of the local newspapers. I satisfied myself taking pictures of the Bairro Alto while Lucia and Barbara pored over the wares in the shop. With our shopping done we retrieved our luggage and caught the bus to the Park of Nations (Parque das Nações) where we caught a train back to Loulé in the early evening. On the promenade next to the Tagus I tried to explain the difference between a suspension bridge and a cable-stayed bridge to Barbara as we marvelled at the Ponte Vasco da Gama, the longest bridge in Europe. Well, that’s what Wikipedia says. I think I lost Barbara.
On the train back to Loulé I was completely absorbed by a young woman (let’s say university age) who wiggled and dipped and jived in her seat for the FULL three-hour journey as she listened to music on her computer. I absolutely drew the line when she started singing out loud and HORRIBLY off key. I clapped my hands and glared at her. England would have been proud of me.
We were nowhere near as adventurous at Barbara’s and Terry’s home at Espargal in the Algarve hills. We tried to get to the beach at Praia do Garrão every day (see pictures), no matter the weather. Lucia and I are beach people in our souls and the hardest part of living in Leamington Spa is that we are about as far from the sea as you can get in the UK. Edgar and Hazel would have loved to have been with us, but they have a couple of months to go before they can travel around Europe with us at will on their Pet Passports. Barbara and Terry have more than enough animals to keep us busy. I was particularly exercised by Bobby their latest addition who is a semi-feral dog and very nervous. I used and tried many of the Dog Whisperer’s techniques (National Geographic channel) on him with some success. Terry might argue differently.
I loved walking barefoot on the beach again, no matter the weather. My long-term goal in life is to live by the sea. We envied the owners of the million pound mansions at Vale de Lobo (Wolf Valley) which had an uninterrupted view of the beach and the coastline. At the end of a long walk it was our habit to retire to one of the beach restaurants for a coffee or a beer, and to gaze out to sea and reflect on life.
If it wasn’t the beach, we were probably out walking the dogs with Barbara and Terry in the hills that surround their house in between bursts of rain. The Algibre River was rushing fiercely towards the sea at the bottom of the valley. It’s a dry river bed for most of the year and this was the first time we had seen it in flood. Our walks invariably ended at the Café Coral for coffee and pastries in the village of Benafim on the other side of the valley.
We stayed in most nights next to the fire rather than venture out to a restaurant in one of the surrounding villages. Café Coral cooked a special veal dish (blanquette de veau) for Barbara on the night we arrived in Espargal. I managed to send a glass of red wine flying off the table and into Lucia’s lap as I tried to mime swimming across a snooker table. Oh, don’t ask.
The day before xmas I cooked two batches of Coq Au Vin for an expatriate xmas dinner in Espargal held at Barbara and Terry’s house. The theory was that it would be easy to warm the dish when the guests arrived. Unfortunately we weren’t helped by the electrics, which decided to play silly buggers with our preparations on xmas day, dimming the lights, paralysing the microwave and sending the oven into a hissy fit. We made do. I prepared way too much Coq Au Vin which we were still eating for the next two nights. In fact, Barbara only finished the last of it long after we had left.
Another 20 kilometres into the hills of the Algarve is the village Monte Ruivo (Red Mountain) where our favourite medronho distillery is located. Medronho (meh-dron-yo) is made from the distilled fruit of the strawberry tree (arbutus unedo) (which is entirely different from the more common garden strawberry.) We ventured to the village through a storm which left tree branches lying in the roads and flattened road signs. At the distillery medronho man was hard at work stoking the fire of his copper still. A steady flow of clear liquid poured out the other end into a bucket. I bought four bottles which we wrapped in bubblewrap for the journey home in our suitcases.
The time to leave came all too soon. After checking our luggage in we sat on a bench outside Faro airport breathing in the warm fragrant air and feeling the sun tingling on out skin. Back at Luton airport outside London the temperature was 1C and the weak sun made no difference whatsoever. There was a joyous reunion with Edgar and Hazel when we went to fetch them and the cats at the kennel the next day. Edgar smothered us in kisses and Hazel ran round and round in small circles.
And that more-or-less brings us to where we are now. We visited Julian, Sandra and Chloe in Tonbridge (south-east of London) on Saturday, and on Sunday we went to Anne and Richard for Anne’s birthday do over lunch.
Here in Leamington Spa, it’s been snowing the whole afternoon and the ground is covered in a layer of white.
That’s it for now
Love, light & peace
Llewellyn
