Praia de Rocha

In Portimao, we parked the car and ate a lovely lunch of fish and wine. Oh! The soups! Gazpacho and fish soup! We took careful note of where our car was, found a cheap room in a little pensao, and returned to the car without incident. Then. We tried to drive to Praia de Rocha. Praia de Rocha is only 2 km from Portimao. It was like driving from our Pommel house to the corner grocery store. It took one and a half hours. We did it like this:

Diagram

The diagram is much simplified. There, in Praia de Rocha, where I took up yet another roll of film (it is lovely in the "Rocky Algarve"), we found a hotel we wished we had found earlier. At about $60 a night, it was the hotel of my-your-dreams. A terrace overlooking the ocean, a court of palm trees planted in five perfect rows of four, the fronds of each just meeting those of the next to form the ceiling of an outdoor room. We were chilly, but how cool it must be in the summer!

Palms And there was a fig tree in the garden, with such wonderful figs, a lot like ours, but you could taste the rain. We had a couple of drinks on the terrace and flirted with the idea of abandoning our room in Portimao and staying at the Bel Vista. It was clearly going to be an extravagance, so we set off to return to Portimao.