Well, hello again from the Other Side.
He he, how dramatic am I? Actually not as much as it sounds. I have had an extremely full weekend, parts of which have exhausted me, made me feel very uncomfortable, relaxed me in ways I didn't know I needed and made me think about my whole life and realise that I have to face some choices in my immediate future.
For those who didn't know, I have been to the UK this weekend. I have attended a Patient Expert Advisory Meeting, so there. There is material for multiple entries flying about in my head, so I will start with the Travelling.
My weekend started on Friday afternoon, with me stuffing my daughter's Hello Kitty bag and a sleeping bag into the back of my Corsa at 4.40pm, only ten minutes after the scheduled time. I had let my son in the house upon his return from school and he was happily surfing the net, which would be where he would still be when my husband got home an hour or so later, in spite of me telling him in no uncertain terms that he was to load the dishwasher before then. My daughter would be walking home from school at 5.50pm for only the second time. A note had been written to my husband apologising for not managing to cook the dinner and pointing him at the correct recipe for the ingredients I had at least managed to buy for it.
I was off to Faro, around an hour away by car if you didn't use the motorway. My friend was in hospital there and I thought it would be very convenient if I went to visit her that evening and then kipped in the car. My flight was at 9.20am, which meant that I should be at the airport by 7.30am, which would have meant leaving the house at 6.30am. Inspired by my husband's boys night out the week before, where he had slept it off in the back of his great big 4x4 wagon before driving home the next day, it all seemed like a bit of an adventure, really. So that is what I did. My friend was pleased to see me and the fags that I brought with me, and after the hospital finally kicked me out, I went over to the shopping mall for some food and a wander round. Armed an hour later with some ham, rolls, Coca-Cola, gummy sweets and a bottle of water, I returned to the car.
Faro sits on the very bottom of Portugal, on a delta of the Rio Formoso. The airport is built rather optimistically at the edge of the river itself, where it starts its uneasy transformation into sea proper. The only thing past it is nature reserve consisting of a marshlandic fight between land and water and at the very edge, a sandbar stretching out along the outer edge of the coastline. This sandbar is accessed via a straight, flat, road lifted a foot or so out of the grassy war land culminating in a straight, flat, bridge over the last stretch of undeniable waterway before the beach itself. The sandbar is almost surreal in its holiday feel. It is basically a strip of sand with a narrower strip of concrete stretching along its centre. The concrete has a road cutting it in two lengthways and houses, bars and apartments crouching along the boundaries either side, half on the beach itself. The third class of man that Jesus apparently forgot to mention in his housebuilding lecture was the greedy man, a group comprised of the real estate agent and the tourist, so desperate for that proximity to paradise and the resulting riches that it seems a good idea to build half on rock, half on sand, out on the 400m wide first barrier between the Atlantic ocean in all it's glory and the flat marshy mainland.
I was headed for the car park, right as you come off the bridge. It is frequented by the Algarve's favourite tourist, the campervanner, and surrounded by restaurants and cafés. I parked under a streetlamp, ate my ham rolls and hopped over the seat to ensconce myself in the four season professional sleeping bag that we had bought some years back whilst living in a tent for a while. I set the alarm on my phone for 6.45am, just to be on the safe side, and snuggled down.
The next morning I awakened at 6.30am. I had forgotten that it's hard to sleep past a sunrise when in a car. I quickly donned a top and reluctantly undid the sleeping bag to let my legging clad legs out into the morning air. It was a little on the nippy side, I may be in Portugal, but it is only March and I'm on the coast. I reach over to grab the keys, and in one fluid motion, exit the bag, step over into the front and slide down the driver's seat whilst putting the key in the ignition and turning it. Nothing happened. Perplexed, I turned the key again before my eye fell on the lightswitch. I had left the headlights on last night and now the battery was as dead as the proverbial dodo. 'O bother,' I thought. 'That's inconvenient.' I looked around at the closed campervans and the deserted cafés. 6.30am on a Saturday out of season is not a good time for muscle-clad Mediterranean men bearing jump leads. My phone had run out of battery in the night for some inexplicable reason and who was I going to be calling anyway? I still had to be at the airport in less than an hour and no-one that I knew was going to be getting to me before that. I stepped out of the car and regarded the mainland. I could just about make out the air control tower and I knew that it was walkable. I just didn't know how long it would take. I went round to the other side of the car and pulled the bag out. As it came I noticed a pair of old trainers under the seat. The sole had worn through and they had been replaced but, I thought, they were still an improvement on the high heels I was currently sporting. I changed into them and hefted the bag onto my back. At least I was only away for one night and had packed accordingly.
Before I left, I stood on the beach, staring out across the sea to the south. The sun had just risen and the sky was pink. The sea was the colour of white under a UV lamp in a nightclub and, still as glass with just the occasional swish of a wave hitting the beach, it shone brighter than the sky. For that second, I felt connected to the earth through the sand that I could feel in too much detail through the thin soles of my red shoes. I turned, and after a last check that all the doors were locked on my unfortunate little car, I started out for the mainland. As I walked along the road, across the bridge and towards the odd coastal forests that abound in that part of the world, with sandy floors and trees with ball-like leaf formations on the branches, the rising sun was in front of me and to the right. Its reflection shone up from the water and the island beach seemed to float on the pale surface. There were no sounds, no traffic, no people, and slightly unnervingly, no 'planes. For a moment I was looking in the face of God and He was looking back, gifting me this time of communion with Him and with the the world that He gave us. This was the calm before the storm and I held on to the feeling a few times in the next couple of days.
It took me about 35 minutes to walk back up the road to the airport. The road is, as said before, straight, with only a few gentle curves to accommodate the end of the runway. After I reached the land proper, I could make out a trail along the edge of the tarmac and I knew that this was a well travelled route by foot and that I would be fine. I eventually came up to the roundabout that marks the entry road to the terminal. I dashed across the main road, ignoring the cyclists' bridge with it's eight shallow ramps leading up and down either side, which I'm fairly certain would have doubled my journey, and trudged across the car parks before finally finding the entrance amongst the fencing and boarded off areas of the reconstruction that has been going on for years. I was ready to fly.
No comments:
Post a Comment