Algarve, Seville, Gibraltar

The last post was very Mollicentric for the obvious reason that it was dedicated (almost) entirely to her graduation. There is no Molli at all in this post because it is dedicated (almost) entirely to our vacation down south and Molli was too tied up with her studentergilde to join us.

We went into each of our last three or four visits to Portugal expecting it to be our last. This trip was no different, but this time we decided to do some of the things we’d managed to visit the Algarve eight or nine times without having yet done: to visit Spain, Gibraltar, and maybe even Africa, and to finally visit the picturesque beaches of Lagos. Maybe even drive up north into Portugal and see some of the old Roman ruins. That was the plan.

I’d booked rooms in Seville, Spain and what I had thought was Gibraltar back in May (about which more later), and we figured we’d just play the rest by ear.

My own wanderlust was being enflamed by Deb & Gene’s itinerary after leaving Denmark: Malaga, Morocco, and Barcelona. Within a few days of my dropping them at Copenhagen airport on a cool and rainy day, they were texting us pictures like these:

A statue of H.C. Andersen in the middle of Malaga?

I didn’t really understand this drive-by shot of a hill:

But the rest of the pics looked like everything one would hope from a journey to southernmost Europe and northernmost Africa:

On the afternoon of June 28, just two days after all the madness of the previous post had wrapped up, we were off on our own adventure.

That’s take-off. And a little under four hours later, touchdown:

And just about an hour later:

I made a conscious decision this time around not to take so many pictures of Morfar’s house and property. It’s almost certainly the most heavily photographed property on this blog besides our own.

But that doesn’t mean I didn’t take pictures there.

Maddie had discovered that the outlet mall was having a mad sale on the Thursday after our arrival—our first full day in Portugal. Up to 70% off on selected products at all the outlets! Woohoo!

(*wiping the sarcasm off my face*)

So that was day one down in the the west: a trip to the outlet mall.

It wasn’t entirely impractical: we also popped into Primark and got some necessities: extra bathing suits, some tacky new additions to my Bright Tropical Shirt collection, and other such stuff.

We then spent a few days just luxuriating in the splendor of Morfar’s Private Resort.

…with the usual jaunts down to Vila Moura for ice cream.

Although sometimes we just popped into the Apolonia Cafe in Almancil for quick refreshment while shopping.

Hey, look, I was there! (In one of my new shirts and with my way-too-long hair actually under control for once.)

We checked in with Molli regularly:

And time slipped idly by.

A little after noon on July 2 we piled into our rental “mini SUV” (which was more like “an unusually large and powerful compact”) and pointed it eastward.

It only took about half an hour to reach the Spanish border, and the coastal hills of the Algarve quickly flattened out into the vast empty plains of southern Spain.

I took this shot at a rest area thinking it would capture the enormity of the sky and the infinite flatness of the land, but it only seems to have captured the parking lot.

It was only about 2½ hours from Morfar’s house to the parking garage we’d been instructed to use by the hotel. The last twenty minutes of that trip were a harrowing drive through the narrow cobblestone streets of Seville, some of which were barely wide enough to accommodate our little car.

It was only an eight-minute walk from the parking garage to the hotel, but the heat was so blistering and oppressive that by the time we arrived all we wanted was water and air conditioning.

Seville

We had two rooms on the ground floor and after checking in we agreed to take half an hour to cool down in our air-conditioned rooms before setting out into the city.

Maddie was very pleased to have a room of her own:

Trine and I cranked up our own AC and tossed ourselves into our bed in hopes of relief from the heat, but a funny thing happened: the air conditioner kept starting and stopping and our lights kept flickering. We futzed around with the settings of both for a few minutes on the assumption we were overloading the room’s fuses or something, but it quickly became clear something was wrong.

I walked out to the front desk and asked the manager whether something could be done; he waved his arm around the big lobby and sighed: all the lights were flickering.

“It’s the whole hotel,” he said, “the whole building.”

He apologized and said they were already in contact with the relevant whoevers and hoped to have things taken care of soon. Until then, however, there was nothing to be done.

There was no advantage to roasting in dark hotel room rather than out in the city, so we decided to venture out and see what we could of Seville while the hotel tended to its problems.

At Maddie’s request, we started things off with a quick bite of some local cuisine.

Yeah, it was a McDonalds, but it was air-conditioned.

It was late afternoon on a Sunday, and the temperature was over 40 degrees celsius. The city streets were largely empty and most of the stores were closed for the day.

One of the few things every internet guide insisted we see while in Seville was the “Metropol Parasol Seville,” also known as “The mushrooms of Seville.” We were right in the neighborhood, so we made it our first destination.

According to the Seville tourism people:

Standing in the Plaza de la Encarnación is Metropol Parasol, also known as the ‘mushrooms of Seville’ (‘Las Setas de Sevilla’). This building, which opened in 2011, was designed by the German architect Jürgen Mayer, who won a design competition to revitalise the square. It is the largest wooden construction in the world (150 x 70 meters and 26 meters in height). Mayer won the competition partly thanks to the way he integrated the remains of a Roman colony into his building. People originally wanted to build a parking lot here, but that idea was abandoned when these Roman remains were discovered.

Annoyingly it was closed for the day (like everything else in Seville), so we were unable to go up onto the walkways atop it. I would have liked that, even though I probably would have had to do it alone.

We wandered around in an overheated daze for a bit, when suddenly we found ourselves next to a “hop-on, hop-off” tourist bus. It seemed like a good idea to take the bus around the city, get a sense of its layout and a chance to identify what we’d like to see more of, while simultaneously sitting down and being cooled either by the air conditioning inside the bus or the breezes that would surely cool us on its upper deck.

It seemed like a very good idea.

Unfortunately the bus rarely paused in front of the picturesque places being described to us on our headphones, so my pictures were pretty haphazard.

…not just haphazard: I can’t even say what they were. The English-language narrator of the audio emphasized details about who was king or queen when various buildings were established, or biographical details of the architect, or some weird historical fact about the times in which the buildings were constructed. It was hard in our over-heated state to make sense of the rapid-fire names and dates being thrown at us.

And we were quickly going from over-heated to super-heated:

You can see the change in expressions…

We tried going down into the air-conditioned body of the bus for relief, and that cheered us briefly…

But it was damned hot anyway.

I can’t tell you much about Seville as a consequence of that endless infernal bus tour. It’s a very old city that was founded by the Romans, and was in fact the birthplace of a couple of emperors whose names I recalled as being among the “good” ones—Trajan and Hadrian. Also one of the bad ones: Theodosius.

But their real pride relates to their role in Cristobal Colon’s voyage to America. An entire neighborhood was pointed out to us with pride as having been home to the sailor who first cried out “Land ho!” from the crow’s nest on sight of the new world. There was a lot of talk about Isabella, and of the regular incursions of Muslims.

When we got off the bus we hurried to the first open store we could find, bought three liters of cold water, and drank about half of it immediately. We then made our way into a sporting goods shop that was well air-conditioned.

Only when we were finally cooled and hydrated enough to continue did we resolve to return to our hotel and give ourselves some time to cool still further in our hopefully functional hotel rooms before figuring out what to do for dinner.

Sighted on the walk back to our hotel:

When we got to the hotel I was fumbling around for my key card when the manager came scrambling out of the lobby down to the wrought-iron gate and waved us in.

The lobby was dark and dozens of people were milling around. Luggage was piled up around them.

“There is most unfortunately no power,” the manager told us, “nor water. How long is your stay?”

“Just tonight,” we told him.

“Ah,” he said, “we have another hotel, not far from here, would you find it acceptable to take two rooms there for tonight?”

We said we would find it acceptable—and certainly preferable to staying in a hotel with no power or water.

So off we went.

I don’t even remember the name of the hotel we were sent to, but its air conditioning worked and its lights didn’t flicker. Our rooms were not on the ground floor, weren’t even on the same floor, but we were so grateful for air-conditioning we didn’t really care.

The air-conditioning wasn’t all it might have been, but it was enough.

I lay in the coolish room looking for a promising restaurant not too far from our hotel, and happily enough the highest-rated restaurant serving traditional Spanish cuisine appeared to be quite nearby: just a few streets over from the hotel.

When the three of us stepped out of the hotel onto the street, I began fiddling with my phone to have Google Maps direct us to the restaurant.

It immediately squawked that we had reached our destination.

I was going to cuss out Google Maps again—it had given us a lot of trouble already that day—but that glanced up and noticed the restaurant was literally right across the street from us. It was no more than ten meters from the door of our hotel to the door of the restaurant.

We’d been planning to go with tapas, but a lot of the reviews I’d read had talked about the quality of their steaks, so that’s what we went with.

And we had some of the best steaks we’ve had in years. Cooked to perfection. Tender, delicious. Perfect.

Downed with a bottle of a local Spanish red, it was one of the best meals I’d had in a long time.

(Also, alas, too much: we’d ordered a bunch of tapas appetizers and were therefore unable to finish our truly exquisite steaks: I ended up taking my leftovers home in a doggy bag and snarfed them down with joy the following morning.)

I woke up earlier than Trine or Maddie the next morning so I could have my hair cut by a barber of Seville.

On my way out I noticed signs for a roof terrace: with fond memories of the beautiful views from our hotel in Athens, I allowed myself a peek.

Athens for the win.

It was Monday morning in Seville. The temperature hadn’t yet reached 30 degrees and the city was bustling with life.

I found my barber and got my haircut.

Haircut by a Barer of Seville: check.

Here’s the lobby of our “new” hotel, by the way:

When the girls were up we went out for breakfast.

We then strolled around the city center for a little bit.

And then we hit the road.

On the way out of town I snapped this pic of a stadium and told myself it was where they held bullfights.

It’s not where they hold bullfights, but since I didn’t get any bullfight arena pictures we’re going to collectively pretend that it is.

July 3

She wasn’t with us physically, but Molli was obviously very much on our mind.

We called her from the car as we drove from Seville toward Gibraltar and were able to sing her happy birthday and wish her well and hear all about the nice birthday breakfast her friends had prepared for her.

We reached our AirBnB apartment at about 15:00 in the afternoon.

Not Quite Gibraltar

When reserving a place to stay in Gibraltar, I’d been disappointed by the small selection of hotels with availabilities at the time of our visit, so I’d decided to give AirBnB a shot. There were a lot more options available, most of them at much better prices. I used the map function to find an apartment that looked big and spacious and was also relatively close to a beach, in case we wanted to swim.

Only after I’d booked the apartment did I realize it was not in Gibraltar. It was in La Linea del Concepcion, Spain. I had booked an apartment in the wrong country.

I was going to take immediate corrective action, but in searching for alternatives I saw a lot of people commenting to the effect that you should never drive into Gibraltar. The border was a mess since Brexit, they all said. Stay in La Linea, they said, and then just walk across the border: it will save you time and hassle.

So I kept the apartment.

Here’s a shot from the entrance to its stairwell, looking out across its courtyard toward The Rock.

We decided we’d stay in La Linea for the rest of the day and head into Gibraltar the next morning.

It wasn’t quite as hot as Seville, but it was still pretty damn hot, so as soon as we were settled in we put on our suits and set out for the beach.

It was not a good neighborhood. There was garbage all over, and there were a lot of abandoned buildings, and it all sort of blew my mind because there in the background, towering over everything at all times, was the rock of Gibraltar.

Electricity like this was on display all over:

I’m actually surprised they didn’t use all those electrical lines to hang their laundry.

All that aside, the beach was gorgeous.

And the swim… the swim! The water was just cool enough to give relief, at last, from the oppressive heat we’d been suffering, without being cold enough to be unpleasant.

I haven’t mentioned it because it’s not how I roll, but I’d actually been sick since waking up Sunday morning in Portugal: I’d had a terrible night’s sleep, had oversunned myself for a couple of days, and seemed to have come down with a summer cold on top of it all. In a word, I’d felt like shit the entire side-trip to this point, just awful, and it had been a constant struggle just to keep things moving along.

The waters of La Linea were my Lourdes. I was cured totally, completely, and instantaneously.

It was one of the great swims of our little family’s history of swimming.

Some more pics of the neighborhood on our way back to the apartment:

The walls around our own apartment complex suggested the neighborhood around us had its problems.

(Either that or they really, really hated pigeons and seagulls.)

And a few pics from our walk from the apartment to downtown La Linea:

The picture above is from a little drama we encountered along the way: a couple of guys were riding electric scooters down this street and had been annoyed by this cab driver. One of them then chose to provoke the cabbie by driving very slowly in the middle of the narrow street in front of the cab; the cabbie shoe to provoke the guy back by driving practically right up his butt. Finally the scooter guy took a spill worthy of an NBA fall, and the real fireworks began.

I took the picture in case things escalated more seriously and witnesses were needed. But really, they’d both been jerks, so who cares?

We had a nice tapas dinner in the middle of La Linea’s main square.

And checked in with Molli again…

After dinner we strolled around a little more.

And found a playground! Whee!

July 4: Actual Gibraltar

The whole point of the trip to Gibraltar was to get to Gibraltar. We had no itinerary, no goals, no ambition at all beyond being there.

It is, after all, the cradle of history.

The walk across the border was exactly as advertised: you walk along the road toward the Gibraltar airport, you queue up in lines to pass through customs, you pass through customs, and you’re in Gibraltar.

The very first thing you see after exiting customs:

I think that must warm the (probably already overheated) heart of Brits coming in through Spain.

From there it’s just a walk across the airport tarmac. We had to wait a few minutes as an EasyJet flight landed.

And then there you are, in Gibraltar.

And the name of the main drag made me smile.

Neither Trine nor Maddie wanted to go up the rock and I opted not to do it alone—mainly because I didn’t think they’d have any fun being stuck in the middle of town for a couple of hours while I went carousing around with monkeys and spelunking through caves on my way to the top of the rock.

So we just made our way on foot to the nearest part of the old town.

What caught their eye in that tunnel?

If all graffiti were like that I would not object to grafitti. I mean, that shows some effort and creativity. (And I’m not entirely sure it’s grafitti: for all I know it was sponsored by the Gibraltar Board of Tourism.)

The old town of Gibraltar is the western end of the town. We found our way to the main square:

Pressed beyond to find the main thoroughfare:

…and decided it would be a good time to go back to the square for lunch.

So we did.

We were in Great Britain, so it seemed appropriate to order fish and chips.

So we did.

They were actually excellent, but afterwards I realized I’d spent part of the Fourth of July, a holiday celebrating America’s independence from Britain, eating British food in Britain. I felt a little traitrous.

But only a little.

Since the girls didn’t want to explore the rock, and the whole draw to Gibraltar for me was the rock, we decided to just sniff around a little more and then head back to La Linea and thence return to Portugal. It was warming up, after all, and we had by now agreed that the best air conditioning we’d experienced on the Iberian peninsula was that of our car.

So it was back across the airport…

Luckily it dawned on me at this point that I wasn’t sure there were any pictures of me in Gibraltar, so I took a selfie just in case.

And a good thing: that is in fact the only picture of me in Gibraltar. (And I’m only just barely in it at that point: we’re about 100 meters from the Spanish border.)

It really is bizarre that you have to walk across an airport, isn’t it?

A moment or two later…

And a final shot from the entrance to the parking garage:

A mere five hours later:

Wait, something’s missing…

Much better.

Are you wondering why we didn’t go to Africa?

Two and a half reasons. First, the only rapid and reliable ferry service was from a town called Tarifa, which has a line straight to Tangier, Algeria. Getting to Tarifa would have been a substantial detour from La Linea.

Secondly, we’d spoken to some fellow passengers on our flight from Copenhagen. They were coming down to Algarve for some kind of African Music festival in Lagos (they were black). We mentioned we were thinking about heading to Africa itself while down in southern Spain, and they advised against it. If you’re going to see Africa, they said, see Africa. Algeria was not African, they said. They recommended we visit Nigeria or Kenya if we wanted to see Africa.

It sounded a little anti-Arab, but I don’t think it was—not in a racist way, in any case. I think it was mere cultural chauvinism. I think they were saying, as European blacks, that Algeria is Arab and therefore not an authentically African experience.

I’m more inclined to obey geography than anthropology on my bucket lists and certainly consider Algeria to be African, but the conversation planted a seed: why not take a vacation in sub-Saharan Africa, and make it for more than a few hours?

The half reason? Deb and Gene’s reports on the African weather were not inspiring. It sounded worse than Seville. The Andalusian sun had bested us: we weren’t interested in testing ourselves against the African sun.

And that’s why we didn’t make a side-trip to Africa on our side-trip to the southernmost region of Europe.

Back in Algarve

Oh, it was hot, but I do miss those starlit Algarve nights. (That’s Venus, shining brightest.)

We enjoyed laying low for a couple of days and scarcely left the resort.

On one of our early visits to Morfar’s Resort, possibly even the first one back in ’12, we noticed something fun about Morfar’s license plate:

MM could be Molli Malou or Maddie Marie, or Molli & Maddie; we marveled to think that from July 3 to December 1 of 2022, Molli would be 18 and Maddie would be 13. It would be a vanity grandfather plate! It seemed unthinkably remote at the time—both of them teenagers, one of them a legal adult! These little girls (shown here at the Algarve sand sculpture “museum”):

Unimaginable!

And now 13 MM 18 is in the past.

Now it’s 14 MM 19.

As Ferris Bueller noted, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

I think we’ve been pretty good about stopping to look around… and the Algarve conditions don’t hurt.

We made the usual visit to the Chinese restaurant we’ve been dining at pretty much every visit.

I think this may have been the first visit where I noticed that the ceiling seemed particularly welcoming to Danes.

(You see it, right? The Dannebrog?)

Trine had caught the summer cold I’d been struggling with and had spent the first couple of days back in Portugal just fighting it off: the hot and sour soup was helpful in purging the last of its worst effect from her.

The last side trip of our visit was a day trip out to Lagos. Its beaches are featured on all the postcards and posters boosting Portuguese tourism, and I’d never seen them: the turquoise waters set off against the sandstone cliffs and wild rocky protruberances forming arches and cliffs. Trine had visited with chicksene back in the late 1980s—a trip she realized with some horror was now 35 years in the past—but neither Maddie nor I had ever come close.

It was our time.

There are a lot of pictures because it was a gorgeous sight, so I’m just going to dump them all here without much commentary.

The picture above is the spot from which we ended up swimming… as you can see, there was a lot of seaweed close to shore, and there was actually a crew there working to remove it all.

Here’s a shot from the same spot, but centered on a gap in the cliffs at right.

We’ll get back to the significance of that gap in a minute. First, more beauty.

We went up the cliff to a hotel restaurant for lunch, passing some of the biggest aloe plants I’d ever seen along the way.

The lunch was nothing special, but the water was spectacular.

We noticed a lot of people swimming or walking (the water was not very deep) around the edge of that cliff at right. We were curious what lay around the bend, so Maddie and I swam around to see.

At first it appeared to be just another little beach in just another little cove, but then we noticed an entrance into a cave in whose depths we could see sunlight. We swam for it and strode into the cave, where we found ourselves in a bit of sand at the bottom of a bowl enclosed on all sides by the limestone cliff.

On the inner side of the “bowl,” the side furthest from the water, there was a V-shaped opening, and there were people scrambling up and over it, out of the cave and presumably onto the beach from which we’d started.

So we scrambled up and over the wall and were indeed on the original beach again.

Here’s a shot I took later from a high vantage point:

That guy is staring down into the bottom of the “bowl.” You can’t tell from that picture, but the far side from his point of view opens up out onto the sea on the other side of the cliff.

Here’s a wider vantage to make that more comprehensible:

I know, I know, it’s not a big deal, but at least I got to swim through one of the famous caves of Lagos.

Finally.

The only disturbing thing about the beach, the only non-paradisical thing, was the sight of people staring down at us from atop the cliffs overlooking the beaches. One couldn’t helpt thinking: they’re too close to the edge! Someone’s gonna fall and die and traumatize us all for life!

“Remember that trip to Portugal when that guy fell a hundred feet down the cliff and died?”

Who wants a memory like that? Not us.

When we got topside again on our way out, we could see these daredevils up close.

Doesn’t look that crazy or dangerous like that, does it?

But let’s take a few steps back:

It’s a massive sign warning people not to get to close to the edge because the cliffs are unstable!

Darwin Award proving ground, I guess.

Lagos itself appeared mostly a wealthy area, with all the signs of an economy flush with tourist cash. But as in Almancil and Faro, and everywhere else we’d been, some of the most remarkable real estate was occupied by ruins.

That former hotel was right on the edge of the sea. A prime location. But it had clearly been empty and rotting for years. It’s just not something you see in a fully developed and functioning economy. I’ll believe Portugal and Spain have found prosperity when sites like that are far, far fewer and much, much further between.

Speaking of prosperity, we went out to dinner in Vila Moura on our last night in Portugal.

Trine and Morfar got steaks that I was told were every bit as good as those we’d had in Seville, Maddie got a carbonara dish with too much bacon (I wouldn’t have thought such a thing was possible), and I had a spicy prawn dish that I’m going to have to reverse engineer at home some day: it was just three or four giant shrimp sauteed in chili oil with chili peppers, cilantro, and chives. It was spectacular.

One last shot on our way out of the marina. . .

And that was it. It was our last night in Portugal.

We made the most of it: I love the exuberance of these pictures.

The Last Day

Anyone who’s followed this blog across the years will have noticed one glaring omission from our trip: we hadn’t set foot in Faro even once!

We’d given up on the steakhouse downtown a couple of visits earlier—it had come under new management and the food quality had fallen off dramatically—and since the carnival is only there in autumn, there was no huge draw to inspire a visit to the town we know so well.

But there was one draw whose siren song could not be resisted. . . and was not.

That’s right: the Faro Optimax man!

As usual, let’s review the whole history of the Optimax man… this time, we’ll go backward in time:

It really does move pretty fast…

We had a quick lunch in Faro.

We got back to the resort, packed, and said farewell to Blue…

Then got in the car and set off for the airport.

A couple of hours later we were settled into our seats for the flight back home—and I was glad to have my own books with me, because Norwegian’s idea of “literature” left a lot to be desired…

Back Home

Our flight got in a little after midnight, Danish time. By the time we were unpacked and ready for bed it was around 2:00 in the morning.

At 7:00 the sewer people arrived to do the assessment for insurance (see the previous post for what that was all about), and at 9:15 we dropped Didi at the vets for surgery to remove some growths in her breasts. The surgery was a success and the vets said Didi came out of anesthesia very well. She’s very much her normal self, only just a little more adorable than normal in the body stocking she has to wear until the stitches come out next week.

And the very next day the Danish summer reasserted itself: a dramatic cloudburst in the middle of the day.

Obviously the cool air and rain were welcome to us, but my having to spend half an hour sweeping, shoveling, and “bowling” the water away from the garage door was not.

Here’s what I looked like after just a few minutes in that downpour:

But what the hell: we were home and we were cool.

And that’s it. We’re done.

Except for one thing: Deb sent a couple of pictures juxtaposing the cousins.

Compare and contrast:

And now that’s really it.

As I noted at the end of the last post: I’m burning up some of the last hours of my vacation getting these posts published, so I’m cutting myself some slack and not going back to edit them. I apologize again in advance for any errors, omissions, or other fuck-ups.

See you in the next post!