​I hope you all enjoyed a great St. Patrick’s weekend. It was lovely here in Dublin…as my mother used to say “March many weathers”.  It was great to see so many visitors to the city for the festivities and the Big Parade.  This week’s blog is about a different Parade that I saw in Chicago, Illinois on 13 March 2004 (in Chicago the Parade is held on the Saturday before March 17th).

I have mentioned before in this blog that one of my Mam Peggy’s favourite songs was Faraway Places.  The song tells of longing to see places "with strange sounding names faraway over the seas".  It was a bit of a joke between Peggy and me that I would one day bring her to Faro-way Portugal!!  We had briefly visited Lisbon, Portugal’s capital city, on our very first cruise in 1999.  We loved it so much that we said we’d definitely come back.

So, in 2005, I booked a week’s holiday for the two of us with Stein Travel for Portimão, Portugal in June of that year.  And we did indeed fly into Faro!  We were blessed with amazing sunny weather for the whole week.  We had such a lazy week strolling around the Portimão Marina, basking in the sun, popping in for morning coffee and cake and dipping our toes in the water at the Praia da Rocha beach.  Mostly I remember the great chats we had as we sat with a glass of wine at the hotel’s riverside restaurant eating delicious meals looking at the boats sailing back up the Arade river each evening.
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So this week’s blog post tells about that break away and how we got on.  Enjoy!