AWW 9.12.2015: Christmas Lunch at Bistro Rainha

18 walked for 2 1/2 hours; then 24 lunched at Bistro Rainha. The scribe´s thanks to Yves for some very professional photos.

The Worm Catchers: 20th July 2016

       Traditionally, around Mike's birthday each year, this being the 86th of those in the series, an unseasonal early morning walk is held, followed by a breakfast at the hosts venue. Mike and Jyll did the honours for many years, one year we catered out in Arao, and for the past 7 or so years, Antje and Chris have held the event, which has always been known as Sparrowfart and featured in the AWW Blogs almost every year.

         This year, ie from the 2015/16 season, the AWW has changed. A subgroup of staunch former AWW's who no longer felt inclined to do the longer distances, faster pace and iron discipline of the latest incarnation, informally became the WAGS,  Another invitation only group APAPS, the brainchild of John H, dragged themselves out of bed at unearthly hours each Wednesday while the AWW took their summer recess, and walked for a couple of hours to be followed by a breakfast.

    Sparrowfart for the AWW is to be held on 27th towards the E of the Algarve, but the westerners comprising several WAGS and some APAPS,(and some who are both,) determined to hold a more traditional event centred on Lagos and Maia Praia. 
    It would have been rude to call it Sparrowfart, as that is the AWW event, so I have unilaterally described it as the Worm Catchers for obvious reasons. I was unable to find a suitable synonym for 'Sparrowfart'

    It has been left to me to record the event, as the Leader of the APAPS is selective in his utterances, and I couldn't bear to see it pass unblogged in our 20th year. So here goes, and in the tradition of modern blogs it will be mainly photos and far less verbiage than I have employed already.

The Worm Catchers L-R: Janet, Maria, Ingrid, Peter, Rose, Paul, Hazel, Yves, Antje, Rod, Myriam, Chris, John.
    Antje had coffee available for early arrivals and it was about 0715 that we took to the road after the photo.  John has still got complete mastery of the remote shot from camera gorilla-podded to Honda door.
    The route was by a circuitous cross country path to the beach near Bar Quim.

    

Once at Bar Quim we were joined by Chris who did the sandy bit and left to supervise non-walkers and to follow orders re his kitchen duties.

The Leader and her support

Marching in Open Order

4 belles

End of beach drinks and bananas

Guest appearance by Max from Bar Quim

A squatter photobombs the ladies

Lagoon panorama

Negotiating the broken causeway.

ex-Wildlife photography

The mussels were still abed.

After delivering us to where the climb started, the Leader abandoned her flock and was picked up by Chris. She claimed she had to stir the breakfast.

Your chauffeur awaits ma'am

Given two choices, the stand-in leader chose the more direct and better tracked option and headed back over the hill to the golf club, and thence to Casa d'Oliveira by tarmac to find....

...the patriarch enjoying a bit of comfort and being waited upon, by Sonia and Jyll who had been recruited as non-walking helpers. Apparently Ian Scott had put in an early and rather brief appearance but had been far too busy to wait and greet us.

Breakfast was soon served on the terrace.

A Full Asian - Thai prawn and rice soup.

The soup was delicious, and plenty of fresh fruit to start and fresh rolls and home made jam to fill up - thanks Antje.

The swimming option was only taken up by a couple of the ladies, and John is keeping those pictures to himself.

The tale of the tape from Paul's GPS gave a rather satisfying result of 15.5 km in 2 hrs 57 moving time....

....but that was tempered by the result from Komoot.de which came in at 12.5 km in 2hrs 52 moving. Both showed 130m. of climb which seems excessive.

In sum, a good event, well worth the early birding, and many thanks again to Chris and Antje for organising and putting on the breakfast.

To finish as is the custom a quote, -  nay a precept by that well-known early bird, Henry David Thoreau*:-

"Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature --if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you --know that the morning and spring of your life are past. Thus may you feel your pulse."

  *Note: The views of Henry David Thoreau are not necessarily those of the author.

AWW 30th September 2015: A Paparazzo´s Hour in the Limelight

 

Sunrise over Lagos on 30th September and reports begin to filter in of a serious “domestic” at Casa da Oliveira. Apparently, the Whittles´ washing machine had run amok in the pre-dawn hours and Antje, in attempting to kick it into submission, had damaged her Anterior Cruciate Ligament or some such essential, and was now doubtful about being able to lead her long-looked-forward-to “Over The Hills And Far Away” expedition to Bordeira. Presciently, however, she had enlisted Hazel and your scribe for her recce the previous week and through them had some leadership fall-back. At that stage, she still hoped to be at Carrapateira for the off. At 8.45am, however, she called to say that she couldn´t make it as she had been advised to rest. In the interests of feminine solidarity, she suggested that Hazel should lead instead. But when I relayed this to Hazel, she turned down the nomination point-blank. A vastly experienced leader in the shape of Terry “The Legs “Ames then hove into sight, but he too declined the invitation to lead on the grounds, I think, that he did not have a mandate and that, if he was to walk from Carrapateira to Bordeira and back, he wouldn´t normally have thought of taking Antje´s proposed route. So, there I was, stuck with it, to the detriment of my taking the usual number of photos.

The Starters outside the lively, early-morning, seize-the-moment Café Bravo

Starters: Dina (welcome back), Ros, Yves, Ingrid, TerryA, David, Hazel, Pam, Lynn, FrankM, JohnH.

Hounds: Rose, Java. 

(Pam´s husband, Nick, was on hand to take the Starter pic but, being under the weather, didn´t walk.)

Track: not exactly as shown by the blue line in this picture, but near enough:

 

Statistics:

Start: 9.15 am – Finish: 2.15 pm.

Distance: 18 km.max.

Followers of political developments in the UK will know that, recently, a new leader of one party has emerged on the scene who has the novel idea that, although mandated as leader, he will not take any decisions himself but will consult his party at every turn. Bizarre perhaps, but I thought I would adopt his m.o. for the purposes of this walk and, to my surprise, it worked pretty well. I began by asking my party which direction we should take at the start. FrankM, who I guess had not much of a clue where exactly he was nor where going, pointed decisively up the Carrapateira hill (which was the correct way by chance ) and we were off.

On we went and at every crucial junction, we were as a murmuration of starlings, veering in unison, stopping and starting as if wired to a single inaudible signal, inseperable. Just as well, as I was struggling to keep up with the pack leaders.

We even paused contentedly to let Yves play with his prehistoric Lego set.

We breezed along to Vilarinha, no problems, and then tackled the 100 metre-plus ascent over the hills with suitable and amicable pauses for the more breathless. We crossed the upland interior without incident.

A relatively minor dislocation to party policy then occurred on the ridges above Bordeira. This was when when Lynn and Yves were inspired by the sights of an old mill and a trig point high on a hill up which they hared, leaving most of us flat-footed in their wake, with TerryA, clearly determined not to visit yet another ruin, staying put. At the trig point, which incidentally Hazel had discovered on the recce, Ros volunteered to go up top, which she did with some anatomical assistance from Yves, toujours le gentilhomme.

At Hazel´s trig point.

On the way back down, we found that Terry and Java had disappeared from  the track. Abandoning them to their fate without a qualm, the rest of us made our way down to the village, from the south, by a narrow but reasonable path (which incidentally had not been included in the recce the week before).

The rooftops of Bordeira

The smokestacks of Bordeira

Here we were pleased to find that the Café, which had been closed that previous Wednesday, was now open again with Terry busy behind the bar laying out attractive dishes of fresh salad, boiled eggs and tuna – alas not for us but reserved for another group of walkers. But we obtained sufficient beers and other refreshments and took our lunch under the trees of the village square.

 

 

 

Terry and Java then reappeared, coming downhill into the village, from the west, and they plus Yves lunched on the Café verandah. (This means, Antje, if you happen to read this, that there are at least three viable routes down into the village from the ridge.)

And if any reader is getting confused (as I was at the time) about how Terry could be both going walk-about with his dog and simultaneously be preparing lunch in the Café, Ingrid explains that the name of the pleasant South African girl running the Café also happens to be Terry.

The post-lunch route took us along the flat ground towards the coast, first across a long meadow, then under the welcome shade of the pine grove, and finally along increasingly tiring sandy tracks and over the dunes to the beach, Praia de Bordeira, which  was swarming with energetic people, seemingly all armed with surf boards and rubber-suit fetishists. As we weren´t so equipped, Nick was able to spot us easily among the throng and joined us.

At this stage, I´m sorry to report that party unity broke down a bit –everybody seeming to want to go their own direct way home, some over the rocks, some by a wet or submarine route through the tidal creek. Corbyn, be warned! Concensus and discipline are not birds of a feather. Anyway, those who did follow the leader and his circuitous route got across the creek to the boardwalk dry-footed. 

Not to worry, unanimity was fully restored at the end of the boardwalk when all were of one mind in deciding not to struggle further on the sandy tracks of the Rota Vincentina but to take the easier if boring tarmac road home.

Back at Carrapateira, which was exceptionally busy with surfers and others, we found that the good lady of Café Bravo, in a remarkable demonstration of entrepreneurial get-up-and-go, had indeed got up and gone, and had closed for the day.

No, we are not open for business.

The other cafés meanwhile were open, bustling, and coining it. Among the crowds, we saw to our surprise a trio of WAGS (Rod, Paul and Myriam). Flint-eyed like a panel of judges on MasterChef or Strictly, could it be that they were there to assess our performance? Running an eye over the talent for possible new recruits to their sprinter group? Time will tell. Oh, and by the way, Paul told Yves not to mention the War (I mean, of course, the RWC.)

So, Antje, very sorry you missed what was really your walk; but it´s one that will be well worth your doing again – plenty of scope for variation. We all hope you recover quickly.

The Obligatory Quotes

There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.

                                                         (Alexandre Ledru-Rollin)

And some have Leadership thrust upon them.

                                                          (anon)

Progress might have been all right once, but it´s gone on too long.

                                                          (Ogdon Nash)

                                                                                    (

 

 

AWW 3rd June 2015: Hot Day at Rosario

 

This was the penultimate walk for the season. An early-ish start of 9am was set. Yves had asked for an even earlier start and was graciously given permission to set off at 8.30 am if he wished , a dispensation which in the end he turned down. But, judging by all the red faces and sweaty bodies at the end, perhaps we would have been wiser to have heeded le Français Sagace after all, because by 9 am it was already above 25C and rising!

The Starters

Janet, Terry A,Yves, Marian, Sarah, Miriam, Lynn, Ken, Jan, JohnO, Laura, Ingrid, Maria, David, JohnH (leader).

No dogs.

15 starters in the picture, but only 14 walked. How come? Well, Terry´s car had received a direct gremlin hit. When he got out on arrival, the door locked with the key  – and his dog – still inside. A call for help was made to Jill back home but he couldn´t join us. Shame. No proprietors´ dogs then, but 2 brown corgi sort of things from the Mira Rio Restaurante decided to accompany us. 

The track 

As you will see, an exercise in how to squeeze several circuitous kilometres into a restricted space.

The Statistics:

Distance: 11.6 km, Total time: 3 hrs 30 mins. Moving time: 2 hrs 45 mins.

Av. moving speed: 4.2 kph. Total ascent: 247m.

A gentle hill

We set off along the canal which was full of water moving at quite a current. By special request of Ingrid, we avoided the first challenging hill and strolled through the little village of Vale de Lama, then up a gentle hill and along and over into the valley below Drambuie House, and then down to the shaded Canal Cottage. Here Maria purloined a large piece of pottery from the Cottage grounds, and watered the two dogs.

Purloined pottery put to good use

This spot brought back memories of a walk here (5th January 2011) when the canal was dry, and two lambs got trapped in it, and today´s missing Terry A was at hand to help the owner retrieve her lost sheep. Four pics from the Archive follow.

 

No such drama this time and we travelled peacefully along the canal to the Clube Nautico where we had quite a long pause. The Clube seemed to have had a face lift in the past few months and, although no barmen were evident, we were able to make ourselves at home.

 

 

“Well, fancy that !”

Further on we struggled for a bit over a pathless hill and the leader lost his sense of direction for a moment, blaming it on recent ploughing activity having obliterated the track, but good humour prevailed despite the ever-increasing heat.

Nifty footwork demonstrated by Ken

At the summit, a strong wind dislodged Maria´s bouquet, but Jan was at hand to re-anchor it.

Back down the hill to the Canal Cottage once more where water was provided for the one dog still with us, when the owner of the cottage, a large bearded fellow, emerged to see what was disturbing his peace. He turned out to be a quite friendly Frankfurter, 15 years resident. Jan asked if the Cottage was for sale, Frank said “jah, for the right price” and, as far as I know, negotiations are ongoing. Does Otter approve? Does Otter even know?

We made our way homeward along the canal, some turning off for a few moments at the Ilha Rosario view point where they saw a fisherman with his haul of dourada (golden bream)

Back then to Mira Rio for cool drinks and for some purchases of oranges, lemons and dried figs.

Instead of a closing quotation (pace the Emeritus Chief Blogger) , how about a reprise of the Muppets´ Whiffenpoof Song” of the lost sheep from January 2011?

Click here:- 

https://youtu.be/nwqgR3MV62g