Four Days in the Algarve

This was a tough video to put together.

I was so gung-ho when DW and I were in the Douro Valley, where my cameras were running from the moment we pulled out of São Bento train station until the light faded from the sky, at the end of the day. On that Monday, we had awakened at about 5 am and didn't get to bed until just past 1 am, the next day, and we had to be up at 4 am, when we finished packing, ordered an Uber ride to the Porto airport, and flew to the south of Portugal.

We landed in Faro, in the Algarve region, and took another Uber to the train station, where we travelled for a few more hours until we got to our destination for the next couple of days, Lagos.

My latest YouTube video tells the rest of the story.

We were in this region from Tuesday, September 20, until the Friday, before continuing up to central Portugal and the capital city, Lisbon.

DW didn't see the video until after I posted it to my YouTube channel. When she told me that she had watched it, she said, "It's good but you completely left out Tunes."

"I barely took any photos in Tunes," I said. We had a two-and-a-half-hour rest in this sleepy town, while we waited for our connecting train, but we had possibly the best meal of our entire vacation in this nowhere town.

It was easily the most memorable.

But the fact is that there was so much in the Algarve that I didn't record. I didn't capture our first dinner, at Taninos, which was also one of the best meals, where we took our time while a rain storm raged outside. I didn't capture the end of our hike along the clifftops in Lagos, where we stopped at a beautiful beach and had lunch on a patio.

I didn't record the memory of sitting on the top-floor balcony of our hotel room, in Portimão, while we ate take-away Piri-Piri chicken and drank canned sangria.

The truth is that after the Douro, after we kayaked on the Atlantic off the shores of Lagos, I was tired and feeling uninspired. There were simply times that I wanted to enjoy the moment, relax, and not worry about video-recording everything.

Still, I captured enough footage (it's funny, how, in the digital age, we still say "video footage") to put together some good memories of the four days that we spent in the Algarve. Between still photos and the video that I actually captured, I think it's a decent retrospective.

Have a look:

Lisbon is going to be even more of a challenge, as I captured even less footage. Maybe that's a good thing. For my Lisbon video, I wanted to capture what I thought was the essence of our vacation, not a day-by-day recount. The next video will be short.

I also plan to break it up, where I show a compilation of memories in one video, a day in Belém in another, and a day trip to Cascais in a third.

Small bites.

The work on that video has just begun. Stay tuned.