Our hotel offered cake for breakfast (apparently it’s a Portuguese thing): they had a whole spread and made eggs and bacon on order. It was a little (and welcome!) jarring from yesterday’s hostel experience. It’s like they read our log and decided to do the exact opposite. Needless to say, we were very pleased.
Like Porto Covo, Villa Nova Milfonte grouped their grocery stores for our convenience. We stopped at the one on the way to the trail and got new fruit for lunch, but as we skipped the peanuts from yesterday, we didn’t need to renew that portion from our reserves. It’s a shorter hike (15.5km), and we didn’t expect to need more food for the segment. We did anticipate that we would drink more water. In contrast to day one on the trail, day 2 is forecasted to be sunny and warm (28°C), which will likely make us drink more and enjoy the feeling of being warm. Some people, like our host for the night, might think we’re crazy, but hiking in warm temperatures is glorious for us. We much prefer warmer weather, regardless of what activity we’re doing, to cooler weather that some people might prefer for sports. We get enough cold in our Canadian winter; we never complain about the warmth.
The trail itself was advertised to be less sandy than yesterday. It was a given considering that the previous day was sandy for pretty much the whole 20 km, and this is a 15 km; it’ll be less sandy just by virtue of being shorter.
As we got going, the first 4 km went around the bay made by the river. On that portion, we were either on a road, a dirt trail or cutting through bushes on a dirt trail. No sandy terrain in sight for sure. The bridge did afford us good views of the town and the river both; other than that, we were not impressed. As much as yesterday had stunning views of bays and the ocean and stark dunes with wild nature, this time around we got overgrown trails and agricultural fields. We saw butternut squash being grown, a bunch of cows enjoying the taste of the shrubs growing next to the fence… that’s high-quality pastoral experience right there, but not what we were looking for. As we got to the second half of the trail, we started hitting sandy sections, and the bay and ocean views came back. It seems that the price for our eyes to be delighted is our legs trudging through sand. Overall, we did around 4km of sandy trudging, and those were the prettiest.
We arrived in Almograve around 14:30, and our check-in was at 16:00. We found a set of chairs on the terrace of the nearest bar for sparkling water and weighed the cost/benefit of continuing with the trail. By 16:00, we were unsure if we were going to skip the last two days if we found somewhere else to go. We researched the next days and the 20+ km ahead of us didn’t promise to be better than today. While we are happy with our performance and can physically continue, we’re on vacation to enjoy ourselves, and if we don’t think we will have fun for the next two days, then there’s no point in continuing. We did have to convince our sporting ego and our sense of completion to let go a little bit. That’s why it took us time to make the decision.
By 16:30 we had booked an apartment in Sagres at the very southern tip of Portugal, a surfer and beach town that promised relaxing times. By dinner time (20:30) we had an Uber reserved to pick us up and drive the 90+ km from Almograve to Sagres, and we had one of our two dinners in the city reserved. Every trip we end up with a change of plan, and this time around it was about halfway on the trip and on a trail.
Dinner at 📍Cova Funda is nothing to write about. We had meat cooked correctly with fries. The bread was dry as a bone and the olives drowned in garlic. We skipped dessert. The only positive thing is that the half litre of good house wine was cheaper than all the wine glasses so far on the trip. (3€ for half a litre).