From one home to another.. Our short stay with Marilyn and Nia was so comforting and mentally & emotionally warm. We’ve been to Cardiff several times and have enjoyed visiting all the sights. It was really nice to go just for relaxing walks, chats, and meals this time.

We started the day at our already-beloved breakfast spot, Coffi Lab. Everything doggie, and human-tolerant too! The quality of food is outstanding and the ambiance warm and welcoming. “Toasty” sounds like more fun than “grilled cheese”!

A quick Uber to Cardiff Airport later..

As Savitri mentioned, we flew Ryanair, which is convenient, cheap, and.. the other “cheap”. They will charge you for every little extra and every exception to their carefully hidden rules. Make sure you check-in online at least 2 hours before your flight.. but then you have to get your actual boarding pass in-person. If you try to check in in-person at the same time as getting your boarding pass and within 2 hours it’s a 55€ charge.. ughh. These are also the people who check your baggage dimensions to the centimeter! One thing Ryanair did do well is partner with Park-n-Fly to give us cheap parking while we were away. 5€/day for offsite parking with a 24/7 on-call free shuttle was competitive and very easy. As with everything Portugal (and Wales), you don’t feel like people are trying to scam you.

Now back to temperature-warm Lagos (Lah-goash btw..) and our Portuguese adventure! It’s only a 2.5 hour flight from Cardiff to Faro, then a 50 min drive from Faro back to Lagos. The first ~15 min was directly into the sun of course, but provided a beautiful (and impossible to capture, especially while driving!) sunset. I really managed to highlight the diversity of insects.. splattered on our windshield.

As much as it pains us to not try some new restaurant for a meal, we were tired, it was late, and we had a family call to attend, so we stayed in and had some yummy left-overs for dinner!