No offence to the Beach....

Most of you know that I like to write about my holidays... and a fair few of you have reaped the rewards in the form of personal postcards-So my trip to 

 Portugal was no different.

 

Portugal was boring. I was sold beaches to rival Croatia and the most stunning scenery-But we were basically in the part of Portugal purposely built for the totally tantastic- Endless vacuumed packed resorts and holiday homes with less charm than my most unimpressed face. We’d hired a car but being driving licence free, I had to rely on the instinct of my friend...Who only wanted to go to the beach. Every day. He was like some kind of relentless beach Natzi.

 I’ve never been stared at so much on a holiday in my life. Apart from in India but that was different. I was wearing a headpiece on the beach, and giant army boots...and sometimes a shawl over my face for protection, but other days even when I was being totally normal, the stares were completely over the top and overly unjustified. Mouths and jaws were actually left open. It was like they had seen something genuinely interesting for the first times in their lives.

I'm not really an all day beach person can you tell?  Sure it's nice for a day and to look at as your strolling past but to lay there like fried fish day after day? Really? We're borderline Britts aboard territory now. The only thing I could think of to do was get drunk-Every single morning and to pass the time on the beach.
These beaches were miles away from anything, no exploring to be had anywhere. No local towns to pop to- nothing.  My book was shit anyway. There was officially nothing to do. Anyway. Luckily I had prepared for the worst case scenario and bought some fail safe collage material ie my last porno from Amsterdam and a few copies of Watchtower, the Joho magazines' they give out all over town. 

 

Seriously?

These boots really did kick up quite a stir with the locals.
 I can barley sit still at the best of times. I go crazy if I have nothing to do. But I had to be on my best behaviour as I had not only been invited to stay in the family home, but selected- Personally hand picked out of a large group of friends desperate to see how the other half live.  

 His family kindly lent us their home for the duration of the week. It had all the mod cons….Shame you felt genuine fear as you approached them. It was IMMACULATE- You could eat off the floor, doors or windows. It felt like one giant egg shell- A false move and it would crack…..apart from there was a cleaner coming at the end of the week. However, despite this, we were still forced to live in the terror of leaving finger marks on the fridge. . No touching, no smelly food, no staying up on my own…yurp. I wasn’t even trusted to stay up at night to finish a movie.  

Really. Really. Relaxing. Holiday.

Our luxury state of the art shag pad was on a golf resort too. The swimming pool actually overlooked the course.

Anyway on my 5^th day my balls fell out and I said maybe it would be nice to go and see some stuff. ......Thunder actually roared across his face. As IF we were going to waste a glorious day on the beach. There was nothing to see anyway. 

****

However we did go into a town- for 2 hours during the day. And once at night for the worst pina colada of my life. I sent it back. 

I Squeezed every last single drop out of that trip I really did. The photos don’t do the holiday justice. And just you know me and my friend are better than ever. We talked about the whole thing in an occasionally heated way but it was all was resolved. Luckily he has a sense of humour...and hopefully he still will if he ever reads this. ;) 

Now here's a very expensive tan line you're getting for free. 

Love from

Charlie Gates

x

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