Faro, Algarve

We caught a flight to Faro in the Algarve yesterday and arrived after dark, so today we set out to explore.

It turns out that Faro is a lovely little town and our first stop was coffee and and a pastel de nata - the fantastic Portuguese tart. 

Then we took a walk around the town and found that lots of storks had made the rooftops their home.

There was even a stork nesting on the top of the lamppost in the middle of a roundabout in the centre of town.

There is no beach in town as it is surrounded by marsh and salt flats, so we took a little ferry across to the sandy beach that faces the Atlantic Ocean.

The beach was gorgeous and the sea was warmish. Darren had worked out a really long walk and at least one mile of the route was paddling along the shore line.

I was in heaven, although it has to be said that walking on the sand was quite hard work. Eventually we met up with the boardwalk from the opposite end of the beach and put our shoes and socks back on.

The boardwalk ran backwards across the sand dunes and then over a tidal lake, and then back towards the town.

The views were lovely and we followed the boardwalk for a while before taking a detour out on to the salt flats. We wondered if they were still used to produce salt, and then around a corner we found our answer.

It was an incredibly long detour and we had our eyes peeled looking out for flamingos. I thought that I saw one in the distance so took a photo and carried on walking. When we got back to our hotel I zoomed in and really cropped it, and here we are - one not pink flamingo.

Not much to show for all of our efforts, and I think that the flamingo needs to eat a lot of prawn sandwiches to bring its colour out.

Brilliant day out though and we walked more than 30,000 steps each, which is the most I have done for quite a few years.