Day 1: It's the end of the first day of my second road trip and it was a good start. Unfortunately I was still feeling the effects of yesterday's hangover for a good part of the day, but I soldiered through.

We had set our alarms for 7:30am this morning but it was more like 8:15 by the time we actually dragged ourselves out of bed. The reason for this was that we had booked the car from 9am. Good to get an early start though. That being said, by the time we were actually away in the car it was more like 10am or perhaps even a bit later than that as we rocked up at the rental place about 9:15 just after a plane full of Canadians had landed, and apparently all of them wanted a car from the same place.

The number one thing on our itinerary was of course the cork museum., As it turns out, cork is a very big thing in this part of Portugal and has been for quite some time. It took us a bit of a roundabout way to get there, but we managed in the end, even without the aid of GPS. The tourist information office pointed us in the direction of the museum, which it turn s out we had actually passed in the car just a few minutes earlier. And boy can I say, was it riveting! We watched a video showing the process of harvesting the cork from the oaks and then boiling it and eventually turning it into useful things. Sure the video was extremely poorly edited and could have show the same amount of material in about 1/10th the time, but who cares! Cork museum! I hadn't been this excited since visiting the Spam museum in the US.

What was actually slightly more interesting was the cork shop which a lady at the museum told us to go visit. They had all sorts of stuff made from cork. Stuff that I didn't even know was possible to make from cork such as bags, hats, watches, wallets, phone cases and even umbrellas. I had no idea cork could be made to be soft and flexible like material. Unfortunately this bit of information was left out of the museum. Google to the rescue for that one.

Another somewhat interesting thing at the museum was a well they had in the courtyard with a pretty cool chain mechanism for bring up the water and dumping it into a trough to run through pipes around the yard. You could even go down the side of the well a bit for a better look. Just had to make sure no one was turning it up the top at the time though as you were likely to get a bucket of water to the head.

Next stop was the beach at Albufeira. Not much to say about this really other than it was really quite a nice beach. Oh, and they seemed to have a weird fascination with sex and boobs. The first hour or so we were there it was all perfectly normal. Just walking along the beach, checked out a few souvenir places, walked around the cliffs, eating some oranges we had bought from a guy on the side of the road on the way in. Nothing out of the ordinary. Then all of a sudden when looking at bottle openers in one shop they were all crazy. A woman hugging a giant dick, a guy jerking off, boobs. Then we started seeing them everywhere. Then in one shop toy monkeys with giant c*** , and c*** warmers and fake boobs. Just what seemed like a perfectly ordinary shop from the outside. Another souvenir shop had a heap of adult playing cards. Not sure what the deal with this place was at all.

Anyway, after that was Lagos, where we're spending the night. Tomorrow we will probably be doing a boat trip and visiting some of the beaches here. Tonight we just booked into our hostel where we managed to get a room with just 3 beds to ourselves and a huge bathroom. Then went and had dinner and then wrote this.

Day 2: Today was an amazing day in Lagos. After breakfast at the hostel we walked down to the beach and got a boat trip up around the caves and rock formations along the coast. It took probably an hour or so and the guide was a pretty cool guy with a decent sense of humour. He pointed our formations such as the wedding cake, the arch de triumph, the mammoth and caves such as the kitchen, the garage, the toilet and the cathedral.

After this we pretty much spent the day walking around and enjoying the sunshine. It is amazing how much of a better mood you can be in when it is nice and warm and sunny. I've been missing this. We were even walking around in thongs and shorts. We went to a little cafe and taught the local owner what an ice coffee is by getting her to add actual coffee to a milkshake instead of coffee flavoured ice cream. She was amazed by it and said we were her best most happiest customers ever. We also did some more shopping for another bottle opener only to run into a similar situation as we had in Albufeira. We went to a bar and got the barkeeps permission to move some chairs outside into the sun, so we had a couple of beers there. Then we end the day with a fantastic dinner cooked by the owners of our hostel.