We hiked A Praia Dona Ana to Ponta da Piedade and the Fisherman’s trail, from Lagos to Luz, today! The Lagos area was a bit too busy for me, but things did quiet down as we moved out of the Lagos area. We were never “alone,” but the views were amazing so I guess when the hiking is easy (as it was today) that is to be expected.
A Praia Dona Ana to Ponta da PiedadeRota Vicentina – Fisherman’s Trail: Lagos to LuzLagos CliffsBeautiful Caves and Rock Arches!Small Seaside VillagesAnd Cobblestone RoadsBlue Blue BlueGreg Finding His MojoBeaches GaloreCliffs and FlowerGreg Beamed Down!
It was a beautiful day! And I’m pooped and headed to bed! Sweet dreams from Portugal!! ❤️❤️❤️
Oh…and some more flowers!
Sea Fig Carpobrotus edulisUnknownMediterranean Lineseed Bellardia trixagoGold Coin with a Little Friend Pallenis maritima Barbary Nut Moraea sisyrinchiumSoap Aloe Aloe maculataPink Rock Rose Cistus creticus
Lovely walk and coffee was followed by a nap…still recovering from our long travel day!
Once we were well-rested we headed back out for a long, slow, amazing dinner at Aldente in Alvor! The pizzas were absolutely perfect, the service was gracious and fun. Highly recommend this place to anyone visiting!
The Portugal Wine…So Good!
Following dinner, we snuck over to take a quick look at Chase and Corey’s new place in Portugal! Beautiful area although we couldn’t see much through the gates, LOL. We’re looking forward to coming back for a visit when they are home!
We made it! All-in-all not a bad flight. Just over 7 hours with no surprises (which is always nice).
Now….arriving in Portugal just 3 days after they dropped a new automated IT system for registration of non-EU nationals travelling for a short stay…that was another story and another hour standing in line due to numerous technical issues with the new system, ugh.
However, we remained in good spirits, picked up some goodies at the duty-free store, snagged our rental car and headed south to the Algarve!
Lunchtime ViewLunch at Miramar, Porto CovoSnacks While We Wait for…Amazing Fish Stew
And after a VERY long day of traveling, we finally arrived at our destination!
A View from Our Room in Praia da Luz
And now we begin our day-to-day planning for hiking and exploring this beautiful seaside region!
Today, Sunday, is the first day of our Portugal adventure! Now, mind you, it will consist solely of getting to the airport, through security, and onto our plane, but hey, ya gotta start somewhere! And, with all that’s going on globally and the implementation of the new European Entry System, who knows what lies ahead, LOL.
So, we’ll see you tomorrow when we land in Lisbon where the real adventure will begin!!
“This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name. The consciousness that animates us is itself central to this mystery and the ground for any experience we might wish to call ‘spiritual.’ No myths need be embraced for us to commune with the profundity of our circumstance. No personal God need be worshiped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation. No tribal fictions need be rehearsed for us to realize, one fine day, that we do, in fact, love our neighbors, that our happiness is inextricable from their own, and that our interdependence demands that people everywhere be given the opportunity to flourish.” — Sam Harris
Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. –Bertrand Russell
Safe in their Alabaster Chambers – Untouched by Morning – and untouched by noon – Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection, Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone –
Grand go the Years, In the Crescent above them – Worlds scoop their Arcs – and Firmaments – row – Diadems – drop – And Doges surrender – Soundless as Dots, On a Disk of Snow.
Translation: The dead untouched by morning (mourning) or noon, sleep in their coffins under their headstones. The years go by, the moon and the universe continue to move, crowns are lost, the powerful surrender and it is all soundless to the dead. Basically, none of this bullshit matters, someday we will all be dead.
It is good, I feel, to begin a new year, or a new day, with a little reservoir of gladness. Here are some gladnesses I have gathered, and two new bird divinations I have made, as a conscious way of consecrating our days with the blessed fact that we weren’t promised any of this — that the universe didn’t owe us mountains and music, that we didn’t have to be born, and yet here we are with our physics and our poems and our ever-breaking, ever-broadening hearts.
Bless the last aspen leaf, waving at the tip of the skeletal branch like a bright yellow flag of resistance to gravity and time, beckoning an allegiance to life.
Bless gravity for how indiscriminately it gives itself to a mote of dust and to a mountain, for how it keeps every single celestial body in orbit for this perfect cosmos to cohere, for how it presses your lover’s body against you to gladden the skin of the soul.
Bless the person who broke your heart to keep their own from breaking on the hard edge of the courage called love.
Bless paper for the way it can kindle a campfire and a revolution, for the delicious confusion of cedar and velvet at the tip of your finger each time you turn the page, for its whispered promise that when all the empires of silicon and bit go the way of Babylon and Rome, it will remain the keeper of our stories.
Bless table tennis for its absurd delight, for the boyish smile on the wrinkled face of the man at the rec center as he props his cane against the wall to pick up the paddle.
Bless blue, for making the bluebird and the sky it flies through what they are.
Bless consciousness, for making blue different to me than it is to you.
Bless mathematics for giving a ballot its weight and Bach his Goldberg Variations.
Bless the clouds, the way they drift across the sky like the thought bubbles of birds, the way they cast a spell against indifference each time they awn the setting sun.
Bless chance for how, across the billions upon billions of tiny and terrific events stretching all the way back to the first particle collisions in the first stars, events each one of which could have gone differently, it sang the bright clear note of you over the din of otherwise.
Bless time, for how despite all its blessed and blessing indifference, it gave the aspen leaf that little extra bit to blaze and gave us, each and every one of us alive, this symphonic interlude between the eternal silence of not yet and never again.
Bless the stranger at the bookstore who suddenly smiles the smile, the exact smile, of my dead friend, as if to remind me that nothing we love is ever dead, that love is the smile that saves life from mere existence.
Bless every grain of sand that made the glass that made binoculars to reveal the cormorant’s dazzling rimmed eye the color of Uranus and telescopes to reveal the nebula three thousand lightyears away looking back at us like a giant cosmic iris with its secret knowledge of what we are.
Bless knowledge, all the species of it — how the small black seed knows to break into the Fibonacci spiral of a sunflower, how we know that when the house burns down and the tyrant takes office and the toe pokes through the last good sock, we still have each other.
May the tide never tire of its tender toil how over and over it forgives the Moon the daily exile and returns to turn mountains into sand as if to say, you too can have this homecoming you too possess this elemental power of turning the stone in the heart into golden dust.
The mountains are whole and beautiful for one principal reason: they have been broken so often… It is the very breaking and jointing, the cracking and carving and breakdown, the weathering and scouring, that all together give rise to the countless forms of beauty — iridescent, miraculous, gift-giving, exultant — throughout the whole of the range. — Steven Nightingale
