A return to Faro

My second visit to Faro, and Chris's first. I'd been there some years before with Virtual Tourist friends and took a real liking to the town. But this trip didn't get off to the best of starts. We'd arrived very early at Stansted Airport as the news in the preceding days had been full of stories about significant delays at airports around the country. With restrictions lifted people were travelling again and the airports struggling with too few staff to handle the sudden increase in passengers. We needn't have worried, about that at least. We sailed through security and found ourselves with three hours to kill airside. And three hours turned to almost four as our Ryanair flight was delayed. Every time we've flown with Ryanair I've said, never again, but then they come up with the best or only route option and I give them a second/third/fourth chance!

To be fair this particular delay wasn't really of their making. Strong winds at the airport were affecting arrivals and thus causing delays. Having said that, if Ryanair didn't have such tight turnarounds it wouldn't have impacted us so much.

Anyway in the end we took off almost an hour late, but after that the flight passed smoothly. Although I could have done without the almost constant attempts to sell us things (food, drinks, duty free fragrances, lottery cards, more drinks ...), another irritating feature of Ryanair flights it seems.

We flew in over the Rio Formosa estuary that I remembered loving last time I was here, looking especially magical in the setting sun.

We were off the plane and through passport control very quickly. It's a small airport and there seemed to be no other flights landing. We'd arranged a taxi transfer through our accommodation, so we're met in the arrivals hall by Jose who drove us to our studio rental.

The Blue Barqueta studio lies on a quiet street near the bus station, equidistant between the railway station and old town - a great location. It's bright and fresh with a modern bathroom and a sleeping area up a rather steep spiral staircase. The owners had left food (bread, cold meat, cheese, apples) and drinks (beer, wine, orange juice) but we wanted to go out and stretch our legs.

So we had a stroll to the Columbus Bar near the old town gate (another place I remembered from the VT meet). There we had a beer and a snack, before a short wander around the town and back to our little apartment to settle in properly.