O tempo é curto!

Sagres is a sleepy town, probably our least favorite stop so far, and the comparatively underwhelming hotel breakfast—fairly or not—will no doubt reinforce that impression in our future minds. Whole wheat croissants, indeed, sniffs a disappointed Ashley. The milk was warm, the cheese minimal, the bananas un-ripe, the cold cuts a touch slimy. So this morning we set off unusually under-fueled.

Far more satisfying to both of us was last night’s dinner at Armazem, where you pick your whole fish and cuts of meat from the display case and then these two guys grill it up on the spot. Afterwards. a nightcap on the patio of a beachfront bar near our hotel, the evening cool and breezy enough to appreciate one of their complimentary fleece blankets.

Next day, as we headed north out of Sagres, a completely different country opened up to us. No more busy national road. Instead, farms, fields, patches of forest, and the enormous nature preserve Parque Natural do Sudoeste Alentejano e Costa Vicentina.

And so very little traffic. Surfing seems to be the main attraction, with 75% of the passing cars and vans carrying a rack of boards. Even the smallest cafe (and there aren’t a lot of them along this rural stretch) offers menu information in English.

We rode one little valley after another, the generally rolling road surrounded by low hills, opening up occasionally to distant views of the Atlantic.

The morning ride mostly consisted of shady flats and exposed climbs; after lunch, it felt like climbing all the way, and the big descent we are sure we earned never came. Every summit seemed to be followed by a long flat, maybe a 1% declining grade, then a few rolling hills and another sunlit, exposed climb. Today the struggle was staying hydrated—and fighting the headwind.

There’s one good thing, and only one, about a headwind. When the mercury hits 80F, and you’re pushing 50lbs of bike and bags up a hill in the sun, you like a nice refrigerant breeze. Otherwise, it means you’re pedaling downhill as well as up, and having the dispiriting experience of pushing hard and downshifting on the flats. Our sage friend Old Biker Dude offers two pieces of wisdom about that: (1) headwinds sleep in, so start early; and (2) a headwind is someone else’s tailwind. Come to think of it, six of the eight other bike tourists we encountered were riding north to south, as if they’d read somewhere that the prevailing springtime winds here are northerly, which they are.

Old Biker Dude also advises being here now, and even in the worst of winds you could console yourself with the fragrance of camphorated thyme, which grows here in SW Portugal and nowhere else, perfuming our way. Yarrow, poppies the color of blood oranges, and the endless eucalyptus trees made our surroundings look as well as smell like coastal California.

The White Storks of the Algarve build their nests on any high and protected promontory.

We stopped for a banana and fizzy water 15 miles in, at a kiosk in Carrapateira, which turned out to be absolutely essential as we climbed and climbed toward lunch.

A monument honoring the Portuguese musical tradition of fado.

Lunch was in a small cafe right off the main drag of Aljezur—a cod dish for David (which took 25 minutes + to prepare, plenty of time for the headwinds to wake up) and for Ashley, tuna steak so fresh she kept having to spit out the scales (!). After lunch, we climbed and climbed, stopping at a super-local Basque-style cafe (Becha/Bexa) for on-the-spot fizzy water and a bottle of still to go. Inside, the pretty much all-male, salt-of-the-earth clientele were drinking pony bottles of Sagres and engaging in loud and animated conversations. “You are American,” the friendly bartender said to David, tugging on his ear. “I can hear your accent.” So much for speaking Spanish in Portugal.

The last 20 miles to Vila Nova de Milfontes seemed to last forever, one hill-not-followed-by-a-descent after another, all under blazing sunshine and against that stiff and now fully awake headwind.

Even David’s ebullient and sometimes annoying good spirits were dimmed, and Ashley was heard to utter an expletive at the sight of yet another completely gratuitous hill looming in the distance.

All day long there was only one really satisfying descent, a long winding road that recalled for us Highway 1 between Fort Bragg and Bodega Bay, with kiss-your-butt curves that carried us into a new region: out of the Algarve, into Alentejo.

When we finally made it into town, at happy hour, the apartment turned out to be elusive. We rode in circles for a while until, sweating and wiped out, we called the owners, who sent energetic young João to guide us to the unmarked green door of our lodgings. We unpacked and showered—but found no shampoo, only hand soap—before venturing out for ice cold Sagres and a hearty dinner of Alentejo-style steak and pork-and-clams at Tasca do Celso.