March 25, 2023
Day 24: Sagres to Lagos
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Below is the view from our hotel balcony in Sagres. It doesn't have a lot of distinguishing features, but I think it is fairly representative of the place. I must admit, sitting down to describe this, just eight hours later, I am furrowing my brow to remember. Checking with Dodie's recollection, she notes that it was easy to get out of town, and that if not for EV 1, it would have been easy to get in. But the town? We are drawing a blank. To some extent this may be symptomatic of a weakness in how we are conducting our Inquisition. We could be accused of just blowing through places, snapping a couple of shots, and saying "Yeah, now what?". I will defend us on that score, arguing that we are intensely experiencing the land here, which is amazing, but the built environment really is "meh". Now, as you read on today you will see us dissing Lagos, but legitimately we have not yet entered the walled city. We'll diss that tomorrow!
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The road out of town, the one much appreciated by us, had a broad shoulder. This was the N268. It joined the famous (among bloggers) N125 at Raposeira, maintaining the same shoulder for the rest of the day.
At Raposeira we came to a red light just before a long hill. Stopped at the light and looking at the hill, Dodie balked. "Lookit, EV 1 turns right here, I'm going with it!". Of course, you know what happened. EV 1 drummed up a hill of it own, but did maintain a paved surface. That is, until it had you safely up the hill - then it turned the surface to dreck! Dodie looked at this and declared "I'm not doin' this, we're going back!". But wait, since we were already up the hill, maybe we could jump directly onto N125. We pedaled over to check it out. There was N125, but it was taking the position that since we had scorned it, there were no backsies. It did this with an impassable metal barrier. So we went back down the hill, into Raposeira again, made our apologies to N125 for having tried EV 1, passed through that traffic light, and back up the hill, again. Total EV 1 cost - 30-45 minutes and 3 km.
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As we proceeded along we spotted some communities nestled in hills or on hills. These all featured the white walls and red roofs. However Dodie observed, at Budens, that some roofs were more red and some more beige. "Wow, they have some raging nonconformists", I observed. But Dodie pointed out that the reds were all the same red and the beige all the same beige, which does not add up to a lot of variation!
I think the Grampies are treading on some uncertain ground here. On the one hand, they want to see some villages that represent a recognizable culture, different from the one they paid thousands of airline dollars to leave back home, and on the other hand they grouse that the houses here "all look just the same". Remember that 1962 song by Malvina Reynolds, popularized by Pete Seeger :
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes all the same
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same
Where do you weigh in on this momentous issue? Leave a comment. Dodie comments that these boxes are at least not made out of ticky-tacky but solid concrete, stone, and plaster. (It's our house in Canada that is made out of ticky-tacky!)
N-125 continued to just whisk us into Lagos. We soon passed a golf course and then some suburban type development. One exciting bit was watching a worker who had scaled a tall palm tree, cutting off fronds with a saw and tossing them down. The photo shows he did have a safety rope, but getting up there was still a mean feat.
As we drew nearer to Lagos, we tried to get a sense of what the town is like. What we saw was just nondescript white blocks. And our hotel perfectly fits that mold. According to Google Maps, we are 1.4 km from the historic centre. And according to both Rick Steves and the Classens, that is worth seeing. We could walk over, but I (Steve) am being sustained right now by Tylenol Cold tablets, and will have to choose a nap instead. Tomorrow, our route leads through town, so we'll wait 'till then to snap our shots.
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Addendum: The Finnish cyclists who have been stopping in the same hotels as us turned out to be Nina and Kari Lehtonen, from Helsinki. Their tour concluded today, and they will soon head home. But for us to remember them by, here is a shot from the breakfast room:
Today's ride: 36 km (22 miles)
Total: 883 km (548 miles)
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