We got up this morning feeling glum although fairly perky despite last night's cocktails. Claire's foot was hurting and looked a bit puffy and a sort of greeny colour. It was only a few days ago that it was puffy and red from sunburn. It hasn't been a good holiday for Claire's foot at all.
We packed up, checked out and started the journey to the airport on public transport. Unfortunately for me, this meant I had to carry all the bags so Claire could concentrate on walking on The Foot without incurring any further injuries.
The local train station was about half a mile up a hill from the apartment. To get to it you have to walk across the train tracks and then alongside the tracks onto the platform. It's unmanned and even more run down than Longport station which is our local station back home. The trains here are strange. They look like they're made of bullet proof metal sheets. The platform is very low down and you have to climb up about a metre up three very steep steps to get onto the train. So getting the bags on board was a bit of a struggle.
Once on board, we had a comfortable but non eventful journey to Faro, with the exception of the on board toilet which was disgusting.
We caught the bus to the airport and progressed through the airport fairly well until we reached the automated passport reading machines. These are machines designed to confuse even the more technologically able travellers. You put your passport in a scanner, then go into a little cubicle where a face scanner compares the person standing in the cubicle with the photo on the passport. Great in theory but rubbish in practice. It took me about 10 attempts, although I think some of these may have been messed up by some old folk scanning their passports while I was still in the cubicle. I had to tell them off. Rather annoyingly, Claire got through first time.
I'm writing this whilst on the plane. The plane is jam packed with babies. I'm sure there aren't enough adults on here to care for them all properly. Most of them are making noise, and we're fighting an overwhelming urge to gather them all up and put them in the overhead lockers at the back.
It's beyond me why anyone would want to travel abroad with a baby. Or have one in the first place for that matter. The amount of stress and noise they generate is phenomenal.
On the positive side, we have a spare seat next to us so can spread out a bit more than normal. This is because as soon as the seatbelt signs went off, the man sitting next to Claire was up like a jack in a box and claiming a row of empty seats further down the plane. I don't know if Claire forgot to put deodorant on the armpit on that side or something, but I'm not complaining.
We've enjoyed our week on The Algarve a lot. It's been nice to have a fairly lazy holiday for a change. Neither of us wanted to go home this morning, although of course now we are on the plane, we can't wait to get back.
The weather has been amazing. Clear blue skies every day and temperatures of 25 degrees or more. The evenings have been warm but not too hot overnight. We've already talked about going back again next year.
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Location:Portugal to Manchester
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