Portugal Frday, Feb. 17/23

Weather: Cloudy 17C Today

This morning we drove to Albufeira to see Jamie and Evelyn who are residents of the marina back home.  Albufeira is a steep and muddled mess of streets on which have been created tens of thousands of multi-story apartmentos.  It is a totally different area from where we stay 20 miles to the west.  Like all these resort areas they started as little fishing villages but in the case of Albufeira it was totally dominated by British and some other foreign holiday makers 5 or 6 decades ago.  In order to get a view of the ocean the buildings were built higher and higher up the steep hills from the ocean.  Then some built higher buildings in order to create more apartments and a view of the ocean from afar.  

This creates a tangled web of very steep streets that can be difficult to navigate and certainly difficult to find a particular place.  However Jamie and Evelyn are in a building that shows up on most electronic maps so we only made one major error driving in.  That required a 180 turn on a narrow hilly street.  So we parked close to where we thought they were and inquired at one of the receptions.  As it turned out the receptionist knew exactly what we were attempting to find and with their apartment number she was able to quickly call them.  As it turned out we were only about 200' from their building which is huge but has no name that we could see.  So they came down to greet us and we spent a few hours chatting in their apartment which has a good view of the ocean and a huge balcony.

They had been on a jeep safari the day before and after being bounced around in the back of the jeep yesterday they were tired so we didn't suggest they go out with us.  Instead we'll pick them up another day and do some touring.

On the way home we were getting pretty hungry so we stopped at the Algarve Shopping Mall to eat.  

 The mall is huge with two stories and about 1/4 of the second story is in the open air.  Their food court has been updated since we were last there three years ago and probably has about 50 restaurants.  We had a very good meal for 7.20 euros including a pork sandwich, huge bowl of soup, drink and dessert.