After clearing passport control, which seemed to take an age, and finding our bags – which, thankfully, both arrived on Portuguese soil, we headed off to find the car that we’d hired. I’d hired a car from Budget, who had come out with the best price for an Economy car, as this is all we needed.

"Holiday Car"

The car we ended up with was a Mazda ‘2′. Even though at one stage I thought we’d get a Ford Fiesta, until one of the other advisers came and robbed the keys. Not impressed, as the Mazda ‘2′ is not the best looking car in the world, but inside it had a lot of space given the size of the car. We spent about 10 minutes trying to get the car seat fitted into the car, which was not an easy task. I think in future I would take our own car seat, just because of the standard of seats at the car rental places is a bit hit and miss. The one that we had wasn’t in bad condition but for that extra piece of mind I’d take our own next time. Plus you always know how to fit your own.

We got into the car, and adjusted to life in the opposite seat for driving. This felt so weird! For the first few miles we decided to take it easy, just to get used to driving on the “wrong” side of the road. It wasn’t just driving on the wrong side of the road, that we had to contend with. There was the fact that everything was on the wrong side, like changing gear with my right hand instead of the left, which took a while to get used to, as I kept going to change gear with my left, much to the amusement of Gemma. Also, we had to contend with the Portuguese drivers who just seemed a little more manic than the usual British driver.

There was one occasion where a car literally appeared out of nowhere, driving right up my backside as we were overtaking a lorry. He was very aggressive as he was flashing his lights and had his indicator on trying to get past. Like I had anywhere to go, and there was no power in the Mazda 2 to accelerate past the lorry and get out of his way.

After a few miles I started to feel a little more comfortable with driving, and by this time we were about to join the motorway. The motorway was really good to drive on, they were fairly quiet, and pretty smooth. We took our time driving as we were not sure where we were going and also that there was no need to rush.
It didn’t take us too long before we were near to our destination. We easily followed the directions that we’d been given by the travel company got to our villa without a hiccup. There was only one time when we (I) made a mistake was when we passed the entrance to the villa. It was not very well signposted and I clearly didn’t see the sign until we were passing it!

The driveway up to the villa was quite tricky. It was single track, very bumpy and in places quite steep. We could have done with a 4×4 to get there, instead we had to make do with the not-very-powerful Mazda, it was so underpowered that I had to put it into first gear to get it up the hill!

We were here now and it was time to relax

To The Villa>>>>>