Adeus a Portugal; Bonjour encore, la France

Our six weeks in the western end of the Algarve in Portugal just flew by, one glorious day after another where I more often than not sat inside working instead of enjoying the sun but was still happy to be there. We did take the occasional walks together on the beach, my friend and I and our brother-and-sister dogs. The promised heated pool never materialized, sadly, as there had been a cold spell when we first arrived and they just couldn’t get it up to temperature fast enough to make it cost-effective—we were only paying to heat it once it got up to the promised temp, which it never did, despite trying for about 10 days. Still, that didn't stop us from sitting around it, soaking up the sun during the warm afternoons.

Bienvenue à Portugal

God has a sense of humor. Or at least He has a way of drawing contrasts in order to amplify our appreciation of certain creature comforts that we may have been taking for granted.

Saturday morning, my friend and I packed the car with our suitcases and the dogs and began our seven-week sojourn with a four-day amble down to the southwest corner of the Algarve in Portugal, spending our first two nights at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, by Biarritz, followed by another overnight seven or so hours south of that, before arriving here in Lagos yesterday evening.

A New Look at Age

My friend and I are planning a mid-January, five- to six-week trip down to southernmost Portugal with the two dogs, Finlay and Tilly. (Finlay is Tilly’s brother.) We thought it would be nice to travel south, trading in temps of at or below freezing to ones more, well, if not summer-like, at least spring-like. 

It’s not easy to find places that take dogs, at least outside France. When she was researching places and sending out inquiry e-mails, Innis found one good possibility down in the Algarve, about 16 hours drive from where we are in the Loire-et-Indre region.

Innis told me she’d written to reassure the owner that we were just two middle-aged women with small dogs. I read that and I immediately bristled.  Middle-aged? I’m not middle-aged!  I’m…oh, wait. GULP. I’m 50.  Well, okay, I’m 50 but I’m not fifty!  And 50 is like the new 30, right?

Or maybe it just looks like 30 because I can’t seem to put my hands on those damned reading glasses I keep misplacing…