The second of our black and white pictures

Last Monday I shared more about the first of these photos which now hang framed on our bedroom wall, today I’m revisiting another holiday memory and strangely also from 2014.

It was also a place we were revisiting, but somewhere we’d first visited together in the autumn of 2012. We’d booked a walking holiday on one of the new holiday’s offered as the Rota Vincentina in Alentejo had only recently opened. We weren’t really sure what to expect, but a week away in the relative warmth of Portugal’s sun in mid-October sounded like a good plan. And it was, we had a great holiday in 2012 and fell in love with the region as a whole, and actually with Portugal too.

We vowed to come back, and two years later we did just that. This time our visit was in June, rather than October and instead of walking between hotels we hired a car and based ourselves at the mid-point of the route from that original trip, using that as our base to revisit many of the places we’d visited before, and even retracing our steps along some of the coastal path.

We’d seen some storks near to our hotel on our first trip and we were mesmerised and amazed, and a little bit scared of walking too close! On our second trip we weren’t expecting to see such a fantastic sight as we drove back along a quiet road to our hotel. So we pulled over and had our own personal photo shoot with the, what I imagine, are the proud parents.

Again the photo is great in colour, and it’s full of warmth from the sun but somehow in black and white the main subjects stand out even more.

Portugal is such a beautiful place, and we’ve been back to visit other parts of the country - including Lisbon, Porto and the Douro valley - many times since, but the Alentejo region holds a special place in my heart, and I suspect it’s about time we made another visit there.

But in the meantime we have a second great holiday memory right there on the wall as part of our series of four black and white pictures, and I couldn’t be happier with how it turned out.

Street Art in Sesimbra

After the weather we’ve been having recently I’ve decided I need some sun on here, and unless the weather turns as predicted, let’s face it looking at holiday photos is the only way I’ll get some sun. So today we’re heading back to Sesimbra, which is just outside Lisbon for a look at some amazing street art. At first I didn’t notice them as art, but as we walked past more and more obvious pieces despite the heat we retraced our steps to capture some of those we’d overlooked to start with.

The character of the man in the one above, and its unassuming ‘canvas’ is outstanding. It doesn’t matter what the words mean, to me at least.

We passed fishermen parallel to the beach, which couldn’t be mistaken for graffiti.

The polaroids were also quite unexpected.

And that’s before we saw the whale, which was opposite our hotel and somehow we’d missed as we left the hotel.

But look more closely - yes that’s a gap partway down the body. I told you they were something special didn’t I?

But I couldn’t let a post of a Portuguese town go by without a tile or two - or even a couple of doorways which caught my attention with all their faded glory.

Sigh. We’re not planning to travel abroad this year, but hopefully when things are a little less unusual we’ll be planning a trip somewhere fantastic.

A garden by the beach

We’re virtually travelling again in this post, this time to Sesimbra just outside Lisbon. We visited in July last year, and like many other things it feels such a long time ago. We’d had a few days in Lisbon before starting a walk from Sesimbra, but while we were there we explored a bit. There was a suggested walk up what looked a very steep hill, so instead we messed around on the beach, took some photos with the ‘town letters’ - that’s for another post though, and stumbled across a garden by the beach. And with sculptures too.

I think after a pretty grey week here I needed that burst of colour. I remember at the time I couldn’t quite get over the the vibrancy of them. And that was even before I spotted the unusually shaped, white building.

Looking back towards the beach the orderliness amused me, only now looking at these again am I reminded of the decorative posts at the top of Hunstanton’s cliffs. More uniform, but not as artistic though.

And with sand.

You can feel the warmth in the picture below, can’t you?

And isn’t it great!

We left the beach wandering through a zig-zag path. Only when we were at the top did we spot the statues, neither of us were very sure about them.

But the views, they’re something special and took our breath away. And won’t it be nice to be able to travel again properly, whenever that is?