Weather: Sunny intervals until late afternoon, then showers.
There was no excuse for not springing out of bed when the alarm went off, but I didn't. In fact, I rolled over and went back to sleep for the best part of an hour. Even then I didn't get up, as Mick kindly made me breakfast in bed. It was a delightfully leisurely start to the day.
At eleven on the dot our day became more energetic as we headed out for a run on a pleasant route on little-used roads and tracks that took us through olive plantations.
This afternoon we headed out again, this time at a walk, for a more comprehensive look around the village - not that it's a big place at all.
What is our impression of this 'new' village? It's too uniform! I don't think we have been to any town or village in Portugal where there hasn't been a good smattering of abandoned houses, often with collapsed roofs, sometimes with just the facade remaining. Then, of course, in any normal village the houses will have been built in different styles at different times - often decades or centuries apart. Here all of the roads and houses were built at the same time (finished in 2002) and the houses are, at a glance, all the same. Every street contains terraces of single-storey, white-washed houses, with identically sized windows and identical roofs. You have to look closely to notice that some houses have two windows to the right of the front door, some have a garage, some have a chimney, etc.
The other notable point is that so many of the houses look closed-up. Many places we've visited have been quieter than we would have expected, but with so few cars on the roads here it's difficult to say whether the population is made up of non-drivers who don't open their shutters during the day, whether the place is dying as a community, or whether holiday-homers have bought up the property.
Beyond the village we found a raised wooden walkway and followed it. It stretched for half a mile, out to a docking pontoon on the reservoir.
Back from our walk, the sky was starting to look threatening, but I'd found some wifi outside of a civic building, so I grabbed the tablet and headed off to download some stuff. It was only as the first drops of rain started to hit me that I abandoned my endeavours (I'd had a productive time, mind!) and ran back to Bertie. Although cooler today than of late, it's been a nice temperature out when you're in the sun and out of the wind, but sitting still under an overcast sky (wearing shorts) in the square, I soon started to feel the cold. I was glad to find that Mick had the kettle on when I got back.
Finally for today, does anyone recall that a week last Saturday, at the farmer's market in Silves, we bought two rock-solid avocados that I said would take at least a week to ripen? Well they finally got there earlier this week; we ate the second one today:
We also finished the last of the 5kg of oranges today, which were undoubtedly the best oranges I've ever had. Not a single tart one amongst them, and all easy to peel. They'd probably only come off the tree on the morning we bought them.
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