Day 12 : Sunrise & Sushi

Not pictured, my sleep deprivation

 This is our last full day in Lagos, so we decide to take a bit slower. The weather has taken a decidedly spring turn, with rain, wind, windy rain, and just generally, The Weather We Are Vacationing From. My wife is a big fan of sun. Full sun, sun sets, sun rises, sun sun sun sun. Whereas my affinity for sun sits somewhere between an albino hermit and those sea creatures that evolve at the bottom of the ocean, surviving only on the sulfureous fumes from underwater vents, never seeing a ray of sunshine their entire, very lucky, lives. 

But, we are in Portugal, and on vacation, and she wishes to see the sun rise, so we do. We wake up at some ungodly hour at which only early morning radio DJs and probably vampires are awake and trudge out, leaving our kids blissfully asleep. Now the sun could stay where it went to sleep for all I care, but we are up, and at the cliffs. Cliffs into the Sea is the majority of what I've seen of Portugal. 

It's coldish, and so early it's quiet. A dead silence that is so complete we actually discover a small farm nestled in the park at the cliff. There's a goat, a sheep, two dogs. And a gate, so I assume it's either the most successful squatting exercise or this farmer never signed off on having his property used for a public park. It's well hidden by some high hedges and some undulating hills, but it's not far from the official wooden track, a stone's throw, for someone not particularly good at throwing stones.

The sunrise, like the sunset, never becomes spectacular. You need clouds, not too much for a really nice sunrise. An appreciable dose of air pollution can help as well. But with the winds the way they are, and the clouds well, being cloudy, we see nothing. A glimmer of something that might becomes really nice but then just fizzles into the cloud cover.

The plaques that adorned some of these lookouts were, SACRILIGOUSLY, all the same.
You're on notice, Portugal.

Our eternal struggle for food and our colony
survival is NOT a mere spectacle for your AMUSMENT.

Back to home, a breakfast with the kids and we are off to walk the wooden path. If it's up to my wife, it's to walk the wooden path until it ends, perhaps somewhere around Spain. It's the ocean and cliffs again, and the wind that will not let up. It keeps things from getting too stuffy, perhaps. We sit, eventually, and become endlessly entertained by an army of ants hauling a Dorito chip home, while, off in the distance, the eternal majestic of the Atlantic Ocean battles the Portuguese coast completely ignored by us. There is no message here, except ants can be pretty cool.

What we would see if we just look up about 30 degrees from the ants.

Nothing much else to report, except when we first got our rental suite, there was this diabolical keypad that might have been installed in the 80's, at the very least the tech was. Somewhere there is an octogenarian programmer wistfully remembering writing assembly to power this damn thing. I assume they repurposed the keys from a Japanese pay phone, I'm not sure why, but it has very Nintendo at the Height of Power, Nakatomi Plaza is really how American's view us, Japanese vibes to me.

Annyywways. It was notoriously difficult to make it register a key. We'd start punching in the code and it would only start registering on, like, the 3rd or 4th key press. We tried all sorts of things then eventually I hit the star key and it registered. So we had it SOLVED. Except the next day, smug in our knowledge we had figured out the intricacies of this 80's Japanese sourced keypad puzzle  Except star didn't work, and no, neither did pound. 

We texted the owner and learned we just have to, you know, press the keys really hard. Somewhere a retired technician for the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone company is gesturing at the screen and saying 'Of course, duh'. 

Our last meal in Portugal I really wanted to have a seafood heavy meal, as that's what this region is known for, and probably Portugal in general. The only issue is one of the family is NOT a big fan of seeing fish whole. It's a thing. So I wrack my brain, and google it, and there is a highly rated sushi place nearby. It's called 'my sushi'. And yes, I realize I'm moving away from the 'eat local' mantra, but what I really wanted to experience is the freshness of the seafood. Yes, it was fresh, it was incredible. 

And thus ends our trip to Europe. London, Spain, then Portugal. Lots of sights, lots of walking. And a varying degree of excellence in plaques. But we'll always have Nico.