Yeah well I could just uh uh mention that we were with our company called utrax uh which had been found by the travel agent uh here in town and they actually had contracted it to a local company uh and we started out actually in uh Pharaoh uh
And they uh took us by Van to the top end of this red line at a place called odenics odenixi or something for battlefx o d e n e i x e uh where we started uh our biking uh we had a bit of an adventure when we arrived in the
Sense that our bikes came separately we hadn’t gone to a shop to fit them and when we got there there was no bike whatsoever that would fit all in uh so they had to go back and they actually came back with two bikes you could choose from a step through or
They’d purchased a small mountain bike far she chose the step through but if they’d witnessed the shop first they would have saved themselves a lot of inconvenience of having to come back uh with extra bikes uh the The Village we were in uh I think you can probably move
On to the next one now can’t you yeah this this kind of gives you an idea of where we were in Portugal with Gibraltar at the bottom and you can see Spain and we’re in the Algarve no but the Algarve is along the bottom we’re actually well
I guess it’s sort of the Algarve it’s the rest they called it the alantasia with the Alan tejo is only the top bit the top bit’s Alan tejo and the bottom bit as you say is Algarve okay and you guys arrived I think a day before we did right yes yeah
And uh you were kind of taking in uh so we arrived in a city called Pharaoh which was what about two hours Um where we started biking and I think this was one of your pictures from before I arrived with Lynn I’ve got the fairy pictures actually on the uh Algarve section but you can do them here if you like yeah well I just got a couple here again this was a theme
We found in pharaoh and actually throughout Portugal were uh a lot of storks on a lot of buildings uh on cliffs uh all different kinds of places uh I guess it was uh the season they raised their chicks and you went to an evening entertainment I think before we came where they were
Playing the traditional music it wasn’t an afternoon yeah we did go to an evening one as well uh for the uh um Fado singing okay and then Norman and I arrived and this is just us down at the harbor in pharaoh uh enjoying the sunset
And uh this is uh the the city we arrived in audaxia and this is just a map of after we got our bikes we did a trial run out to the uh the beach uh to have a look and then we we were kind of following the biking route that we
Would do the next day but we wanted to give our bikes a try it was an 8K bike yeah yeah and this is uh the fellow uh who dropped us off with our bikes and like Helen mentioned uh the pla the original plan was that we were to go in
Pharaoh and have the bikes fitted to us but they uh they failed to do that and as a result um Lynn was really unable to use her e-bike that she had rented uh So eventually actually Norm took over that e-bike uh and uh and used it during the
Trip his original plan was to use a paddle bike I ended up being the only one on a pedal bike the problem with the pedal bike they gave me is that it’s a mountain bike and if you look at the one by by the uh fence there in front of the
Building there you’ll see the seat uh is at the same height as a handlebar when you sit on that basically you’re doing a nose dive and I can’t ride very long on that it’s too hard on my shoulder and my back right I might add we all got a shock
When we were presented with mountain bikes uh this had been listed as a novice intermediate bike ride by you tracks so we thought knowing their novice is just a cycle along the Flat River Trails intermediate would be gently going up and down uh on uh what I call step through type
Bikes and suddenly we were all presented with mountain bikes and we subsequently did find the terrain a lot more challenging than we had anticipated we all wrote back and said you’ve undergraded this one uh as I say some of us like me had never ridden the mountain
Bike in my life never mind the terrain you use them for and this was our trial bike ride out to the beach uh so uh there is my pedal bike and Becky and Norm are there on their e-bikes no I was on the pedal bike there oh that was your pedal bike okay
Yeah yeah the other one hadn’t arrived yet yeah right that’s when I knew I couldn’t do it it was too hard on my back yeah and uh here we are just above the beach near uh dixio and these were some uh some of the beautiful flowers uh that we found along the beach
Uh a nice picture of Helen there with her bike helmet on above the beach and you’ll notice the beach has a fair amount of waves pretty well all the beaches down this Atlantic Coast that we were on the southern Atlantic coast of Portugal uh clusters surfing beaches they’re not they’re all paddling beaches
Of the Southern Algarve portion oh and this is a a wonderful shot that uh that Helen got over the cliff with her camera of uh a stork raising their two chicks which I thought was really very well done yeah if the chick falls out they’re gonna fall a long way
And more pictures of the beach and uh this was just looking down the street in uh adexio uh very pretty little Community they had a little windmill uh at the End of the Street uh and a little corner store um and the hotel was in selected Cottages
They had one Cottage that was sort of there eating pool area but we were all staying in Cottages scattered up the street uh some of us were way up at the top of the street actually and that gives you an idea of the pool area and uh it was all very very nice
There and there we are enjoying our happy hour so the next day was our first day of real biking uh so that evening uh you uh the company you tracked said contracted with uh had brought uh an e-bike that uh that Lynn was able to use
Uh it was still a bit big but uh usable and uh Norm had decided given his back issues that he would switch to an e-bike the other thing that we should mention is uh they dropped the bikes off and really gave us no true support it was
Like we’ll figure out how to set the height of your seats how to make all the appropriate adjustments um and how to get the bikes ready and set up for yourself and how to learn how to ride a bike on an extremely downhill slope uh figuring out how the brakes are
Going to work because it was too steep to actually ride it it was fun so our hotel was about here we got down the mountain and we were having a lovely bike ride along the river to about here and here oh well I’ve got my arrow on it more
Look on your screen oh down there the bottom all right okay so we got to about here uh and uh we were confronted with our first dirt road heading straight up the hill and uh I wouldn’t dignify it by a road I’d call it a track
Why okay yeah on the screen on this screen here you will see the the kind of elevation that we were doing that is kind of like the elevation gain and loss as you’re biking yeah well yeah it’s 376 meters so this was just a a little I think Helen took a
Picture of this as we were zipping along and this is just before we hit our our big mountain um we headed up uh and I think Lynn promptly fell off her bike but with a norm walked up the hill with her and she got back on and persevered Right Lynn I
Might attack backside I was back at the Village we’re staying in didn’t have much Choice it was pretty steep so we continued our Ride Along through the countryside and eventually we encountered a zebra which was kind of interesting they had a little uh I don’t know quite what it was
Some kind of uh a wildlife park there and we took some pictures of zebras and eventually we bike down to a lovely uh Jesus man I thought you eliminated those no you just told me to eliminate one of them I gotta pay you better I’m sorry man I didn’t see him put that
One well I would say that that’s a person who knows how to protect themselves from sun exposure but anyway moving on it’s pretty it’s it’s you know and this is us at the beach kind of enjoying uh wandering around and exploring it and I thought this was a
Wonderful picture of Norm who decided he was going to ride his bike through the waves I was out in the water quite a ways too yeah yeah out there on the Atlantic uh having fun uh another shot of the beach this one after we done the beach
We kind of uh came back up and we’re riding so we came down this uh track down here I think you can see it and then we explored the beach and went over here and then we rode back here and this is us up at the top I
Believe yeah and some more shots of the beach we then uh kind of uh proceeded through um well we had lunch in a little Community there and then we proceeded through the countryside and uh we ended up going quite a bit Inland and this was a shot of us uh kind of enjoying
Um or stopping for a moment as we’re we’re kind of proceeding along the way at this little area now I’ll mention uh I haven’t mentioned how we were finding our way around uh I was a navigator uh they had given us an app for my phone uh
So I was using the GPS and the maps on that phone to find out where we were and to locate where we were going and it was always kind of a bit of a surprise when I would say oh we’re gonna head up here or this is the road down or uh
Especially as some of uh there were a few times that got quite quite tricky getting uh getting down these it was kind of like beginning mountain biking but uh a little bit more Mountain uh norm and I have kind of done a little bit of mountain biking I haven’t done
Any in a while uh so I was kind of used to how to ride a bike on dirt tracks whereas Helen Becky and uh Helen uh were a little bit challenged yeah and just to clarifying not ride her bike backwards it was extreme mountain biking the other
Thing I would add that if you we were very thankful for Wes’s technical expertise uh this company uh which I would always caution people about did not provide us with any paper maps whatsoever our previous biking experiences uh on the Moselle on the Danube we had always been given
Excellent maps with the Viking routes marked what to see whatever this was all done by their app and by GPS and as I say there there were no uh bicycle uh markers or signs on the majority the tracks so as I say it really needed uh someone with Wesley’s level of
Expertise on the techie side for us to find our way around uh Dawn might have managed it and I think the rest of us would have been totally lost another shot of the little windmill uh so the next day uh we were going to leave our hotel we had been there two
Nights in a DEX going to elves Azure and we were going to stop at this uh Beach along the way uh and we had a an interesting day started out fine kind of heading along a dirt road and then we headed up this big hill and
Uh I being on my pedal bike was chugging away at the back and and the e-bike people had gone all up ahead when suddenly I heard kind of a poof and my back tire went uh uh decidedly flat so luckily Norm I think spent most of his childhood fixing bike tires
Uh at least that’s the impression I get when he talks about it so he’s very good at fixing bikes uh but uh the tire as you can see when we got it off left uh there wasn’t much left to that time and that was where Lynn stepped in to save
The day for us because uh I had normally I always carry duct tape but I had left my pack behind and uh didn’t have any with me and Lynn did so we were able to put duct tape inside of that tire because our fear was we
Would use the spare tube they’d given us and I would just blow the tire again within moments of heading down the the highway so we put duct tape inside put in a new tube and I was able to carry on um this was a little rest stop uh we had
In some kind of garden yeah a little community garden or Village Garden because it was really just a village um and they had some heavy exercise equipment you could practice on I think Norm was practicing on it yeah because I didn’t do enough biking and then we came down to the little Beach
Uh which was a lovely beach with a hike we hiked up to some Cliffs up above it uh for a view of the coastline um just looking back down at the beach yeah so really nice uh area to check out yeah there were also some really interesting
Little plants along the way and flowers um growing along the way and uh I’ll mention that when we got back down to the beach I checked my front tire and guess what only 10 minutes left um no 11 minutes left oh okay uh so um I checked my uh my front tire and
Found that it was uh starting to go flat as well but we were able to Pump It Up and continue on uh and we managed to get to the hotel we had phoned the uh the bike people and they were coming that night and they did
Arrive with a new tire and spare chips and spare tubes and basically replaced our stock got a new tube in the front for me and a new tire new tube on the back and I never had any further problems on the trip what he didn’t mention is but we arrived and arrived
Here the uh front tire on his bike went flat no I didn’t oh did you sorry missed it okay well it was going flat uh uh so that was that day um the next day we were going to bike all the way to from alizer to pedrova and this was another interesting day Um so uh I think we we s we started out uh oh we started out by going up to visit a castle I’m overlooking the reasons where we were staying uh right I can’t remember the Castle’s name but sir and it’s a Moorish Castle this whole area uh of Southern Portugal like
Southern Spain uh at one time was occupied by the Moors from North North Africa and this was a Moorish Castle we stayed in the BNB down there you know sure yeah oh and so that was the castle we then proceeded along uh and eventually came to another beautiful beach which we went
Down to investigate I think we left our bikes yes it was quite a steep incline down and we found a bunch of surfers uh and people taking lessons down at the beach yeah they a lot of these beaches are used for surfing lessons norm and Lynn practicing yoga
And people some kids that looks like learning how to uh how to stand on their surfboards being silly we then uh proceeded from the beach and as usual my little GPS took us on to a decidedly dirt road uh with a few ruts and some other interesting things make some of our
Logging roads look tame yeah I might add the worst bit of road we were in such Terror of that we never even stopped to take a photo we were hanging on like Grim death and saying our prayers all the way down of it yes some of us were swearing yeah foreign
Yeah but you were learning all about mountain biking really there that’s just a picture of the road we’re headed down and I think we’re going to the little beach down in that Cove yeah and uh so the we got down there and we ended up stopping at a little
Restaurant for coffee and an ice cream and at that point Norm looked at the back of his bike and said uh oh my pannier isn’t there so while Helen Lynn and Becky kind of hung out there norm and I turned around and we come down quite as this is quite as steep uh
Uh Hill going all the way down to the beach we ended up going back and climbing up the hill now I was on my pedal bike and I couldn’t go up as fast as Norm on his e-bike so he just powered on up there and luckily uh some kind
Stranger had found his pannier on the road and set it on a post yeah and then on a post so uh Norm found his pannier and we were able to turn around and head uh head back um and we got we got back to the little restaurant just before Helen uh Lynn and
Becky were about to uh to head out we then still had a fairly major climb on a road to get up to pedrovo which is like this abandoned city uh that the Viking company bought right Helen no it’s an abandoned Village that the hotel company bought oh okay yeah and
They turned the village into basically a hotel uh they renovated some of the Cottages uh a dining area uh a swimming pool and they’ve made it into a rustic Hotel uh although it was we we thought at first it was going to be somewhere literally in the middle of nowhere
Because it’s an abandoned Village in the middle of nowhere but it actually wasn’t unattractive at all and this is it was called a slow Village I thought that was interesting yes it was and it was a bunch of people that bought it uh probably decades ago and uh and then they just gradually
Um acquired all the all the houses and such and uh yeah made it into a hotel and Resort but I loved the idea that it was a slow Village in the middle of nowhere mm-hmm this was uh this picture is me from inside the room looking out onto the street
So that’s when you open the window up and there you are looking right at somebody walking by um and uh the next day Lynn decided for some reason that she needed a rest day I don’t know why I was going to have a slow day in the slow Village God knows so uh
So Becky Helen and I um did a little uh kind of going a bit over uh well similar territory to what we’d done the day before but we will Loop down through this Valley here they can’t see them okay yeah and then explored the beach here and then this beautiful Coastline
All the way back up uh again this is another shot of pedralva and this I think is Becky’s one of Becky’s pictures yeah she took a picture of us biking yeah and US heading down the dirt track in this little Valley this is a good part of the road and
Carrying on it was a very attractive Little Valley we found some Shepherds with their uh goats so I think everybody’s back and watching so we were proceeding down the Little Valley I think this is a bougainvillea um So This Is Us on that nice Beach that I was pointing out on the map
And it was full of uh almost like sand dunes getting to it that’s where’s on top of us Norm on top of a sand dune that’s Wes that’s where sorry yeah yeah down to the beach it wasn’t too bad a sand to walk on it was fairly firm
And again watching some Surfers play in the surf on the beach well I’ve seen some bikers play in the surf oh and this is after we left the beach we started to go around the Headland and there were just such beautiful colors in the Rock and I think especially uh when
Helen shows you her her little trip later you’ll see a lot more of these kind of rock formations along the uh the sea they have autos and caves and all kinds of interesting things just really interesting uh geology in that area and no we didn’t climb down
The front of that and I think this was what Helen it wasn’t the Sun a little Moorish settlement they had yes yes yeah and this was the remains of their uh of their buildings um and I think that’s a look at the next speech we went down to yes but just look
At the beautiful colors and I think you can see a hiking trail we didn’t do that one we did try uh try to get down to the beach at one spot which didn’t really work out but uh mountain goats could have done it yeah and another beautiful beach to walk on
It was just gorgeous in this area as far as the beaches and the the coastline was concerned as I said they’re all surfing beaches but the sand is good firm sand it makes wonderful walking on them it’s a nice surfing shots the beautiful colors and then we kind of
Had a split party after that because you could go back there were two routes back to Pedro padell pedralba uh one was on the highway which was fairly straightforward and easy and the other one was by a dirt road that the description was a bit dicey but norm and
I decided we were up for the challenge and I think Becky and Helen decided that the highway route would be the the one they would prefer that day so we headed up this dirt track uh it turned out to be not a too bad little dirt road
Um it did have a couple of really tricky spots in it which is what they were referring but they were very short ones yeah and then we’re back here in pedrova this is the restaurant area there and the pool restaurant area on the left and this is the pool the pool wasn’t wasn’t
Heated I can’t believe but it was okay once you got into it once you were numb you didn’t notice it and we’re uh at our very last day when we went from pedrova to say grace and we went um via the westernmost point in Portugal or I think
It’s the westernmost point of Europe yes uh okay Vincent yeah okay that’s the westernmost point of Europe right yeah yeah so uh we headed out uh on the last day uh going basically to the countryside uh we ended up uh uh exploring eggs well I think I took a slightly Wrong Turn
Anyways we eventually found vielus uh the beastbo ended up stopping at the store and found her way to that point and then finally to say grace which was our ending point where they were going to pick up the bikes this just gives you an idea of the
Countryside they had uh these big uh windmills everywhere uh there were some beautiful grain Fields uh with thistles and some other crops we saw along the way um I know uh I ran into trouble there with one of those roundabout things because I went into it the wrong way well it it
The we basically had to cross a road and I ended up in around about feeling like I was in European Vacation he thought he was in in England he was going the wrong direction around the roundabout they’re using the rest of us yeah and everybody
Was trying to follow me and it was it was not very big we knew which way to go anyways we eventually figured out that it wasn’t that direction at all it was down the road it was and then we ended up I remember we got to the bottom of
This big hill and Lynn looked up at it and went she didn’t know whether she was going to get back up to the top of it Norm said well you can push your bike up but I’m going to rock and then Lynn just powered on up there she did great she really did
Character building wasn’t it Lynn oh did Lynn come back yeah she’s back yeah oh okay she’s viewed it oh this is the uh uh at that uh Southern Fort of Santo Antonio double Lexi oh yeah yeah portisanto Antonio yeah and the lighthouse is being restored so it’s all done scaffolding
Right and you couldn’t access the lighthouse portion but we had a good tour around and look at at the fort as much as we could access and the Beautiful views this was another little uh Fort I think we visited you and I well I think we oh right
Yeah even I went up yeah uh so we got to the end point where we’re going to drop off the bikes and we still had an hour or two so I think Helen you went down to explore the Old Port part and norm and I went off to um
Uh explore the fort of say grace and from there this is a view from there to the other one that we were at oh and we’re just kind of exploring there and this is I think the final picture uh of the fellow that came to pick up our
Bikes and we said goodbye to the bikes at that point uh norm and I um went off back to Pharaoh where we kind of did a tour and some I think we had a day in pharaoh before we headed off to England uh to uh to um
Start our Hadrian’s Wall uh hike uh which is the third episode of this so um yeah um they picked us all up here and took us by Van to Lagos where Norman West could catch the train back to pharaoh and they dropped Lynn Beckham myself outside our car rental agency uh
Preparatory for our week of Pride alerts on the Algarve but that’s where we start the next show yeah yeah so I think we’d all agree we had a great time there um it was uh it was um uh very interesting I think uh I think especially Helen Becky and Lynn
Learned a little bit about mountain biking that’s right strawberries have a deep end and see if they swim yeah Lynn mentioned she hadn’t used her gears much but I think she had a good grasp of gearing on bikes by the time we were done oh yeah did you hear me say
If it wasn’t for Norm I’d still be at my tail teaching me how to ride a bike I would still be walking a 45 kilometers bike if it wasn’t for normal so thank you you’re welcome but you would have made it I think the takeaway from this is um when
You actually start talking to about companies about their their tracking you might want to do a little more research than we did we made a lot of assumptions as to what they classified as a novice intermediate level biking for Wes and I we’ve done some of these kinds of bikes
Before so we could manage it wasn’t easy but we could manage it but when you assume definitions are the same uh from one country to another uh think again because this was not what I would have considered in many places as definitely not no of us and uh question whether or
Not intermediate would have been actually appropriate some of that sections we went through it was more into the advanced and everyone just kind of like took a grip and worked it out and and made it down all of them um you know maybe kind of cursing halfway down
If not all the way but uh it was it was well done yeah it was well worth it in retrospect it was beautiful yeah and the other thing I would also make sure if you ever do uh end to end football bike uh unless you have Wesley’s level of
Technical expertise make sure they give you a map as well uh I will refer to this later when we get to the Cotswold the company there gave us superb Maps um and as I say uh the digital was available people wanted it but they also
Backed it up with the maps for those who haven’t got that level of technical skill so that’s also something to check out if you ever venturing on uh and into in anything the other thing to point out again is is that we made Wes and I made sure we had
A phone a cell phone with the uh with a Sim chip that would work in Portugal which became really really valuable because we had to make a phone call to get uh tires and you know repairs we did our repairs but we needed the supplies
So we were able to make phone calls and make sure that the bike companies met us where they needed to meet us with supplies so we could actually do tires and rims and or tires and tubes so make sure that somebody in the group has a working phone just for that purpose alone
And uh and definitely navigating yeah Within I know in England when we got to England there’s so many signposts everywhere like on the Hadrian’s Wall Track you’d have to really work to get lost but in Portugal it was just uh you just had to figure your way with with what they gave
You you had to work to find the fine post but the route was nice in that we were off the main highways we didn’t have a lot of traffic to contend with uh we got very Scenic beautiful beaches to look at so that was very nice
So a very enjoyable trip it was actually very good thank you really good thank you wizard okay well I think that was landed see you next week hopefully for the next installment of Algarve and into in Walking in the consoles and then the third week from now will will be the hadron’s wall
Thank you bye everyone bye-bye