No Rain-Yet

 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 cod as their main course and were presented with steak sized portions that were far and beyond the paltry fillets we normally see. A local white wine offered a pleasant but hardly memorable accompaniment to the meal, but at slightly less than 10 euro a bottle, we could hardly complain.

  Without the aid of an alarm clock, we didn’t stir this morning (Friday) till 10 am, just in time to catch the tail end of our hotel’s breakfast buffet.

 We spent the remainder of the morning hiking to a the Obelisk commemorating the visit of King Pedro IV . Built in 1856 it offered a spectacular view of the city and surrounding sea. Returning to the main square via a series of staircases we enjoyed the splendour of several gardens of colourful flowers and plants imported from locations as far away as New Zealand.

  After a well deserved lunch of ice cream, our afternoon was spent touring the west side of the island with a prearranged tour bus with stops at a pottery, cheeses factory, various scenic lookouts and a final stop at the northern town of Bisquitos, famous for its vineyards and lava enclosed tidal pools used by locals in lieu of Sandy beaches, of which there are only a few on the island. The former, unlike wineries in other countries were small, perhaps 20x 40 ft plots surrounded by low walls of lava blocks, designed to retain and slowly release the sun’s heat during the cooler times of the day. Due to the generally low temperatures in the Azores, the wines produced are primarily white, red grapes requiring somewhat higher temperatures to flourish. Upon return to the city we decided to forego our evening meal for something lighter as a heavy meal and a boat ride may mix, but not necessarily within the confines of the digestive tract!

 Our later evening was spent with a small group of fellow vacationers riding a large zodiac catamaran for a “sunset” cruise. It offered us a somewhat subdued and heavily cloud covered view of the sunset, but highlighted by a stop some 2 km offshore to watch a large pod of dolphins feeding and surfacing alongside our boat.They frolicked in the water quite close to our boat while gulls swooped in to snatch any leftover fish scraps floating on the surface. After about 15 minutes they moved further off shore as we continued our trip along the coast to the fishing village of San Mateo before we reversed course and returned to the marina in near darkness.