I awoke at 11:30, again, this time to my dad. He'd been up for two hours. As I packed my bags, getting ready to return to London, I opened the windows. The sounds and smells of merriment and guitar street performers and fresh pastries filled the air. I remember thinking how sad it will be to leave. This is such a laid back country.
I checked out of the Residencial (i.e. Gave the maid my key), and put my bags in the car down by the Marcado Municipal. We went down a few side streets to pick up a couple souvineers. Since 50% of the world's cork is from this region, we bought a cork wallet and flask for me and a cork bag for my mom.
We ended up at a pastry shop where I ordered my first incountry Croissant Com Chocolate. It was very good. They cut a regular croissant in half, poured melted chocolate into it, and closed up the sandwich.
We started to say our goodbyes to Lagos, but as we approached the car we saw, on the other side of the canal, in modern Lagos, a really cool looking old flat bottomed boat. So we took a brisk stroll down the prominade along the river, across the footbridge and back along the river to the ship. A good walk but it wasn't worth it. The ship was kinda boring.
We walked back to the car and marveled once again at the dirt that had caked onto it. A horrid sight.
We drove out of Lagos for the last time, and got on the surface road towards Faro. Two days ago I wanted to stop for a few hours in Portimao, and we figured today was a good day to do that.
So we followed the signs to Portimao, and arrived in the town center around 1:30. We parked next to a place called the Gazoline, and walked over a few blocks to a pedestrian street.
Portimao is much larger than Lagos, as it is a huge shipping port. But the center of town feels small, and the pedestrian streets branching off of the large square are a pleasure to walk down.
We made our way to the water, and stopped to eat at a Portuguese/Italian restaurant, Restaurante O Pipo. My dad has been dying to try a Portuguese specialty, Cataplana, a fish stew. Each place that had it only had it for 2 people and I had no interest in eating that. But this place, our last meal in Portugal, had Cataplana for 1. So my dad had that and I got the Spagetti Bolognaise. My food was delicious. My dad was not impressed by the Cataplana.
We walked down to the water after lunch, and enjoyed a brief stroll along the water. On the way back to the car, we true to get into an old church but, from the looks of the decrepit grounds surrounding it, the people of Portimao haven't even gotten inside in a few years.
We did, however, find ourselves on the square again and stumbled into another church, whose doors were open. Beautiful ornate decorations adorned the back wall, complete with Jesus on the cross behind a wall of glass high above. We saw what looked like a reliquary, and we asked what was inside. The guard said it was "Jesus mort," dead Jesus. I was hoping for a real relic instead of a statue, but oh well.
We were leaving Portimao when I spotted on the other side of the road a carwash. Bingo! We turned around at the next roundabout (traffic circles spot Portugal like boils on a Bubonic Plague victim) and pulled into the Autobubbles.
A self-service carwash, 1 euro bought you 2 minutes 12 seconds with the power hose and 2 euro got you 4 minutes and 37 seconds. You could turn the wheel on the hose control spot that would make it spray hot soapy water, cold rinse water, or that finishing spray that makes it all nice and clean for a while.
With the power that that hose emits, a normal person would have his car washed, rinsed, and polished, wheels and all, within 2 euro. It took us 5.5€. There was so much dirt caked onto that car, inside and out (if it can be recalled, Jeff, in all his wisdom, floored the car with one wheel spinning in a mud puddle while his window was open), we had to go over it again and again. My dad had to scrub the inside dashboard with dirty laundry and I had to powerwash the inside of the doors. There were whole rocks (of no modest size, either) stuck in the wheel wells, splatters of mud dried between the sideview mirror and the mount it was on, cakes of crud on the wiper blades, and God-knows-what on the undercarriage. But we saved ourselves what would likely come out to a 50€ detailing charge from Avis.
Car as clean as it could be, we got on the A22 highway to Faro. Having avoided the A22 all trip (we opted for surface roads), we were delighted to find a flawlessly smooth road and virtually no traffic.
Tearing down the Portuguese countryside at 130km/hr, we began to see signs that we were headed in the direction of "FARO/ESPANHA." "Of course!" we said, "Spain is only a couple dozen km on the other side of Faro!" It's only 50km past Faro, to be precise. The next 30 minutes were spent debating the merits of rushing to Spain, zipping across the border, jumping out and back in and coming back. We were just about ready to do it when we realized we needed to fill up gas before we returned the car, and that would push us over the time we had left if we also went to Espanha.
We got off and found gas and the Avis return center with almost no incident. The Avis guy checking the mileage was shocked to see we had driven 375 kilometers in just a few days. Our odometer had gone from 60240km to 60615km.
We arrived at the airport via Avis shuttle at 5:30. My dad tipped the driver, and I chipped in my last euro coin and half euro coin, leaving me with literally .03€ left. When we handed him the tip, my dad attempted to say "Obrigado," Portuguese for thank you. Instead, he looked the man dead in the eye and said "Avogadro," as in 6.22x10^23. Fail.
Our flight was at 7:15. We stood at the back of the check-in line and waited.
At 6:15 we finally reached the front of the line, and we discovered we were already checked in. Apparently we'd done it online. Whoops, we could have skipped the line.
The line for security was nightmarish, but we got through without incident. On the other side of security we walked into a shop labeled "Flavours of Portugal." I picked up two bottles of good port to bring to school, and my dad got a bottle of olive oil. I tipped the girl with my last 3 cents. Out of euros, perfect timing.
We stopped at another store for some cheese on our way to the gate, B53 (I wish we were one gate over, I could have boarded singing Rock Lobster). By the time we left we realized our flight was leaving 20 minutes from then.
We booked it up the escalator, to passport control. As I got my passport stamped I turned to my dad and said "Avogadro." He laughed, then made a conscious effort to say "Obrigado" correctly to the customs agent. "Obigadro" escaped his lips. Win.
We made it to the gate and onto the loading ramp. We waited in line and got on the plane.
EasyJet has no assigned seats. So since we had gotten on almost last, we had little chance of getting adjacent seats. We did find a row of three empty seats in the second to last row and took all three. To keep the middle seat empty, we had a heated argument over nothing while poor unseated passengers tried to find homes for their posteriors. We succeeded in our seat-saving endeavors.
The plane left the gate 3 minutes early, and we were on our way to London. I did some work on the plane, my dad slept. At one point an attendant got on the intercom and started rambling on about Duty-Free shopping.
"We hope you're enjoying your flight to Gatwick so far; at this time I usually like to tell passengers they're going to another location just to get them to look up at me and pay attention, but you all seem like a nice enough group of passengers, so I decided to skip that today. Now, the moment you've been waiting for, the highlight of your weekend, Duty-Free shopping is here!" And on and on. He read us items from the list of things for sale, invoked the "nobody deserves something nice more than you" line, and ranted for 5 minutes.
We landed 20 minutes ahead of time, and the captain began to rant in his "Welcome to London" speech. Some highlights: "Please keep your seatbelts fastened, we may need to stop suddenly or make a sharp turn, and we'd hate to have any of you reach the terminal before us."
"If any of you are mothers or mothers-to-be, I'd like to wish you a happy mothers day. We've all had mothers at one point..."
We got off the plane and after a several kilometer walk (one of the ways EasyJet is so damned cheap is because they take the distant places in the terminal no one wants to go on), we found ourselves at the back of a ridiculous line for passport control. My dad checked ahead and motioned for me to follow. As I walked forward I realized that 200 people were waiting in the UK/EU line and 1 person was in the "Other Nationalities" line. We breezed through. It's good to be American.
We found our way to the bus stop, and my dad ran inside again to buy tickets. He came back after our 10:25 bus had come and gone, giving some crazy story about rejected credit cards.
So we waited for the 10:55. I ran inside to get some dinner for my dad and I. As I was waiting for them to heat it up, the bus came. An anxious few minutes passed while the sluggish cashier took our sandwiches out of the press, cut them, placed them into their own containers labelled "hot" and placed those into a bag. We made the bus and were on our way to Heathrow.
An hour later the bus arrived at Terminal One, Heathrow. We made the same trek we did a few days ago, in reverse, through the bus terminal, through the subway (apparently that's a British term for tunnel), and through the terminal itself.
We found a checkered cab (because no trip to London is complete without a checkered cab ride) at midnight and he drove us the 10 minutes to the Sheraton Hotel. As we pulled up I was glad my dad traded in whatever bonus points he's built up in his travels for this. I figured it's be nice to live in luxury for our last night. Checked in and in room 3215, we repacked all our stuff so when we get to New York I could just move on to St. Louis without grabbing various souvineers from my dads bags and such.
We lay down to sleep by 1:30, with a 6:30 wakeup call scheduled. We were planning for the next day to be daylight savings time, but apparently in England they don't do it when everyone else does? So suffice it to say we would have an interesting morning, alarms going off at 5:30, 6:30, and 7:30.
I tried to get to sleep but my dad, who's picked up my cold on this trip, was snoring louder than a jet plane taking off. I whacked him a few times with a pillow and he eventually stopped around 2. Sleep.
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