📍 Algarve, Portugal 🇵🇹

⚠ Warning: these pictures could lead to one booking a trip to the Algarve. ⚠

Since Morocco wasn’t happening, we compromised and booked a flight to Portugal earlier than expected. Although we had a nice time in the UK, it was cold and rainy and I was very ready to leave. As I have mentioned many times, we had to be really careful with staying in the Schengen Area. We could not stay more than 90 days out of every 180 days—which sounds like a lot of time—but, trust us, the time flies. I was in charge of keeping track of our time (risky) but I was so ready to leave the UK, so when I booked our flight, I very quickly “double checked” our days available and, well, kinda winged it. When we arrived at the airport, we were questioned for about five minutes and I realized our departing flight was booked on our 90th day. Summary: we could not have stayed in that country for an hour more even if we wanted to. 😅 Close call.

Day 1: Because it was off season and Portugal is overall cheaper than London (and because our original plans fell through) we decided to treat ourselves and find a nice resort on the water for our first few nights. It was warm, sunny, beautiful, and, just like that, we were thriving. The resort we stayed in was called Tui Blue Falesia. I’m not sure if hadn’t stayed in a “fancy” hotel in a while or if we were just so relieved to be in a warmer place with some space, but this resort felt like I was in perhaps the fanciest hotel in the world.

By the time we landed, got our rental car, and drove to the area we were staying, it was lunch time and we DON’T MISS MEALS. We found a local restaurant called Tavertinos and had some pretty delicious Portuguese meat on a stick. For the record, grilled pineapple should accompany grilled chicken every time. We also tried this odd textured Portuguese pie. It was interesting—glad we tried it but no reason to seek it out again.

We purposely did not make any plans the day we arrived so we could simply enjoy the resort. And we did just that. It eventually became dinner time and we were very content to not leave the hotel (don’t mind me as I Google squatters rights in Portugal), so we ended up having the buffet dinner they offered. Think massive cruise buffet but with really good food; that was our meal. Overall, I’d say we had a pretty good start to our stay in the Algarve.

Day 2: I had read a few blogs and they had all recommended Ponta De Piedade. We drove over and woahhhh. Speechless. And I always have words (a lot of them).

J had read about a private cave that was a short hike from the top of the view point. We followed the directions as best as possible and eventually found said cave. We had to do a bit off roading to get there, but we made it and it was worth it!

Once we made it…

After we spent time in the cave and worked our way back up to the top we were getting hungry. We drove to downtown Lagos and found a restaurant called Pesce Di Strada and had ourselves some seafood tapas.

We walked around downtown and eventually decided to drive back to the cliff area to watch the sunset.

Day 2: We had a boat day! We wanted to see the Benagil Cave so we booked a boat tour and traveled along the route in the picture below. Unfortunately, it was a bit of user error because the cave is too small for boats to enter, so we got to see the cave but were unable to go in which was our goal. Guess we gotta go back. 🤷‍♀️

Tip for anyone going to the Algarve: rent kayaks to get into the cave—it looked really cool in there.

We didn’t get into the cave, but our day didn’t suck.

Obviously, it was hard boating all day and we worked up an appetite. We ate at Casa De Fonte

We eventually made our way back to our hotel to explore the area and watch the sunset. (In case anyone was worried about us eating breakfast, the hotel had an amazing complimentary buffet that we had daily.) I digress, we took the staircase from the hotel to the beach and came across these views.

Before dinner we squeezed in a quick pedicure. If we were going to be on the beach, we had to fix our nasty toes. Mission complete. With nice looking toes we had our buffet dinner and watched the sunset from our room. The hotel had a band playing so we went down to watch. Imagine cruise ship but like in a 55+ community. We were, by far, the youngest people in the room, but had a blast watching everyone get down.💃🕺

Day 3: Back to that breakfast I was talking about—we had our last breakfast at the hotel. 😢 We fueled up and went to go play some tennis. Update: I can confirm that when I don’t play tennis for a while, I utterly suck when I do play. It was a painful experience but at least we got some exercise. J on the other hand played just fine, of course.

We showered (to everyone else we saw that day: you’re welcome) and hung out by the pool before we said goodbye to our resort. We were on our way to the train station to go to Porto. We were hungry by the time we got to the station, but we had to drop off our car first. I had found a few spots to stop at to get food but the universe was testing our patience: the first one was closed and the next only took cash (I never have cash). Time was ticking but we finally found a place that had pulled pork sandwiches. J ran over to get them while I waited at the train station with our bags. With a few minutes to spare, J returned with sandwiches, we boarded the train, and we were off!