For the next stage we needed to get to to Faro to drop off the car. On the way we spent a few hours in Loulé, a town only 20 minutes outside Faro. We had set the GPS to go to a parking lot near the town centre. But when we arrived there wasn’t a car park. We completed a couple of high-stress circuits through the narrow streets trying to work out why we couldn’t find it and eventually gave up following a heated discussion in a supermarket carpark we stopped in to consider our options. We headed off in the opposite direction down the main street and found a park in the middle of nowhere and a 10 minute walk from where we wanted to be. On the plus side, the car park was in the shade and we weren’t driving around in circles anymore.
While on our fruitless driving circuits, we had seen a castle but later when we got up close it turned out to be just one standing wall of a former castle. But despite the challenges of things that didn’t exist (carparks and castles) it was a lovely town to walk around and we liked the general atmosphere.
Heading back toward the urban wilderness where our car was, we thought we would come across a good local spot for lunch. Once again this town thwarted us and we didn’t find that either. The one place we found had the plate of the day listed as “mashed peas”. Visually it just did NOT appeal and it may have been delicious – we could live with that adventure not taken. Luckily there was an Italian restaurant near the car and a plate of pasta set us up for what turned out to be another driving adventure.
We decided we could drop the suitcases at the hotel before returning the car to the airport depot. The logic was that we wouldn’t have to drag them to town when we got on the bus. It was a great idea until …we couldn’t find the hotel on narrow streets which were further complicated by major roadworks. Totally confused we pulled over into a clear area to consult the maps to see where we went wrong. Studying the map, we looked up to see a man yelling at us. We had chosen a spot where there was a big no stopping sign that we had not seen. He was a bus driver and couldn’t bring his bus round the corner because we were in the turning bay. Oops!
We zoomed off and found a real park and we decided I would walk the 5 minutes to the hotel with one suitcase while Andrew ‘guarded’ the car (he played the ‘my leg is not so strong’ excuse). So I rolled my suitcase through the busy restaurant street, sweating in the hot afternoon sun, to find the hotel was about 10 metres from where we had obstructed the bus. I checked us in and then repeated the journey with the 2nd suitcase, while Andrew “looked after the car” with the air-conditioning on and reading his phone. We dropped the car off at the airport and took the bus back to town. And actually we were very happy we didn’t have to lug the suitcases onto the crowded bus.
Having had one evening meal on the busy tourist street, the next evening we went down a parallel street and found restaurants with almost no patrons. We ended up having an outstanding Persian meal, sitting outside and drinking Shiraz – something Andrew still complains he couldn’t do when he actually visited Shiraz.
With a couple of nights/ one day in Faro we walked the old town, visited the museum, and another ossuary chapel. The last time we were in the south of Portugal we visited one also way back in 2007 https://andrewpaula.com/europe/evora-february-2007.html/. Faro was worth spending a day to explore rather than just zooming through to the next destination. Andrew really enjoys spotting the big stork nests on most buildings.
