Terceira island 2022

 We spent Tuesday,our last full day in the island, shopping for souvenirs- mostly cork products imported from the mainland. With the global market for cork in decline they have managed to use this versatile tree bark to make everything from place mats to hats, wallets and even footwear.  For lunch we met with our friends at the town Firehall. A relatively unknown “hidden gem” it offered a three course meal including soup, main course, dessert, coffee and a half litre of red wine for the unbelievable price of 6.50 euros.  We shared our final meal of the trip at Beira Mar, a well known seafood restaurant in the neighbouring town of San Mateo, where I finally had the opportunity to sample a plate of lapas . (limpets)   Served in a manner similar to oysters they proved to be a bit if a disappointment. Baked on their shells and drizzled in garlic and oil they offered a pleasant flavour burst on first taste but tended to be quite rubbery, like overcooked squid.  ...

 Monday June 6th turned out to be a religious holiday on the island so, just like Sunday, many restaurants and most stores were closed. So, with little else to do we set off to explore the extinct volcanic outcrop known as Brazil which is located at the south side of the island. Offering a large expanse of dense forest with several walking trails and overlooks, it also featured the largest fortress on the island, the Castle of S. Philipe. Built by the Spanish in the 1590’s and featuring almost 5km of ramparts it is currently used as a base by the Portuguese military with much of it being off limits to the public. We covered several but certainly not all of the walking trails where we were able to see a small family of deer. In the evening we hired a taxi to take us to the adjacent town of Terra Char, some 5km away.  Arriving at the Main Street just before 6:15 we found the Main Street had been prepared for action. The local citizens were, for the most part securely located beh...

 Our Saturday morning was a lazy one, pass we did very little other than packing on breakfast calories. In the afternoon we set off for a series of Lava caves and fumaroles located in the centre of the island. The first lava cave descended about 150 metres via stone staircases and displayed a variety of mosses, ferns and algae with a sizeable pool at the base, fed by waters dripping from the central hole exposed to the sky. Our second stop was to fumaroles, in ground vents releasing sulphur vapours and warm moist gases. A normally circular path was all but rendered invisible by extremely low cloud cover so we skipped that part. Our final stop was the Gruta do Natal ( Christmas Grotto) It featured mostly horizontal low ceilings and roughly uneven floors of cooled lava streams, making walking a challenge. Required hard hats reduced our chances of scalp lacerations and skull fractures as we limboed through the narrow passageways, often on our knees. Returning to town around 5, damp an...

 Friday night, or more like Saturday morning and so far, the three days of promised rain showers have not materialized. In fact today the temperatures reached 24 degrees C, warm for this time of year.  Thursday we spent the day lazily wandering the streets of Angra in search of a decent supermarket and were rewarded with a small bag of oranges, bananas and pears as well as some local cheeses to snack on. A bottle of Tawny Port was all of 5 euro and a bottle of premade Sangria weighed in at about 2.50 a litre.  Both lunch and dinner were at a small but popular place named O Chico. Offering a decent selection of seafood , I was finally able to satisfy my craving for both grilled squid and octopus, both being not only tender but quite delicious- a far cry from the rubberized dishes normally encountered in Canada.  Dessert was an amazing flan, a little heavier than the kind we normally encounter and scoring an 11 out of 10 in flavour. My dinner companions all selected co...

 Thursday June 2nd It is day 2 of our Azores trip and we are relaxing in our hotel room after a somewhat lazy day exploring the town.  Our flight , Azores Airlines landed at 6:30am yesterday morning after a 5 hour red eye from Toronto Pearson. Amazingly our luggage arrived on the exact same flight- so AzoresAir gets an extra * compared to Alitalia and Delta with their less than spectacular track record. Customs was straight forward with a cursory “remove your mask” as the officer scanned to make sure we weren’t wanted criminals. A prearranged shuttle service took around 30 minutes to get to our hotel where we discovered that check in was 2pm, some 6 hours away. Dropping our cases and grabbing only the bare essentials, camera, hat sunglasses, we set off in search of whatever.  After wandering the streets for an hour we located the hotel where Susanna’s friends were staying. It turned out they were in the same boat with a later (4pm) check in.  So we settled in at a ne...

 After close to 3 years of relative dormancy Covid has abated enough that I'm feeling OK crawling into a narrow metal, possibly disease infested, narrow aluminum tube again, as it streaks across the sky to new destinations. At almost 70, I am closer to the end of my global travels than I am to the beginning. And while that is something I would rather not consider, I do find myself looking forward to the immediate future with a degree of excitement. My last trip of any significance was my visit to Sicily in 2019. And while I have scheduled a return visit for September, along with Tuscany, my first trip is somewhat closer and shorter.  An impulsive response to an email that I would normally ignore and delete finds me packing for a trip to the Azores in a few days time.  The reaction of several of my friends was: Where??? And like many Americans when asked to point to Canada on a map! the average person would be hard pressed to point them out on a world globe.  Some 150...