July 31 – Portimão, Portugal – supposed to be Tangier, Morocco

Weather – 27º

Steps – 6,387

good morning Portugal

When we planned this trip 2 months ago, we thought we’d be waking up in Africa today, instead we are in Portugal – actually not very far from Africa, but still not Africa. I’m the last one to begrudge a lazy morning, so I revel in a slow morning with no alarm set. In a few days alarms will be plentiful.

Travelling requires a lot of flexibility. Flights are delayed, bags are forgotten, ports are changed etc. I have never had a cruise port changed that has really gotten me into a knot – that being said, I’ve never had a port changed that I had my heart set on. I think we have the luxury of youth-ish allowing us to

revisit or replan anything that goes sideways. March 2020 – we thought we’d be in Bali, India, and Singapore…we all know how that turned out.

Anyway…point is…when we planned this trip, we thought we’d be in Africa on July 31, but instead we are in Portugal…I’m not sad.

I’ve done a bit of research on Portimão, and it doesn’t seem like there’s much to do here actually in the town. Today’s excursion was supposed to take us out of Portimão and into a couple different towns. That is until we decided to blow off the tour and enjoy the ship.

We spent the morning hanging on our balcony where it was glorious - warm, but

not too warm, breezy but not too breezy, so we thought…let’s keep doing this.
This cruise has been so busy, we’ve haven’t had much balcony time. Plus, often when we want to be out there it’s bathed in sun and heat…today was perfect.

Dinner tonight was at the ship’s steak house. The ship has 4 restaurants - a main dining room, an Italian (last night), a steak, and a French. The steak and French are by reservation only, reservations can be booked months ahead and are super popular…we don’t understand the hype. These places are good for a

kinda big menu

change of scenery, but the main dining room is where we like to eat. The menus change each night in the main dining room, so it’s not like you eat the same thing night after night. However, if you do want to eat the same thing night after night, they have an entire menu of things that don’t change.

We couldn’t get a reservation for the steak or French before we left home, but yesterday thought we’d try to see if anything was available. Sure enough, Monica in reservations found us an open table. I’m sure they hold a few open tables each night, but we like to think Monica pulled some strings for us. Monica was one of the staff here who recognized us on the first night of this cruise and greeted us by name. I think she remembers us from Chris’ retirement cruise, I don’t think we saw her on the ship on the Brazil cruise at Christmas,

good night

even that would be impressive…but from 2020…WOW!

thanks Regent!!

I also had to do some shopping today. We had some onboard credit left. We used some on a tour at the beginning of the cruise, but I never want to leave here with money wasted. Shopping onboard Regent ships isn’t great, I got enough moisturizer and lip balm to last a life time or at least until we’re on board again at Christmas.