How nice it can be if you can bring work and vacation together. A conference takes me to Porto, but the chance to miss Portugal is out of the question for me. A small road trip is planned with Sara. We fly in the exact opposite direction from Portugal, namely to Faro. There we want to rent a car, drive along the coast to Porto and return through the interior.

The first night is not in Faro, but in the small, nice town of Olhao. We reach the place in the evening with our car and enjoy the first impression of Portugal with wine and seafood.

The next day we set out to explore the famous Algarve. You hear a lot about it, everyone wants to go there. We want to check it out, drive along and find that it’s terrible. Not as terrible as the Costa Brava (the hotel castles are not that bad), but in addition to the masses of tourists and the move, the water is just icy, the waves too high for swimming and the wind blows us off our feet with North Atlantic temperatures.

We drive to Benagil and hope in vain to swim to a famous grotto there, drive past Lagos and surrender at the top of Sagres in front of the tourist buses.