Entry 3
The first few entries of this diary are designed to get you caught up to speed with how we got here. As of publishing this article, we have received our visa. You can also watch our countdown to moving on the YouTube channel, start with Episode 1:
Previous entries:
We piled into an Uber and headed south toward the Golden Triangle.
The Algarave is…interesting. That was the first start. Not quite what I expected. A bit beat up.
Twenty minutes later, we pulled up to the Conrad Algarve in Quinta do Lago.
I don’t know how to describe the mood shift. We’d just spent two days in Lisbon getting defeated by hills and metro stations and cobblestone streets that felt like driving into favelas. The train ride was difficult.
And then suddenly we were pulling into a five-star resort surrounded by manicured gardens and palm trees and the kind of silence that only money can buy.
OK. This is more like it.
Quinta do Lago
We checked in, dropped our bags, and went exploring.
The Golden Triangle — Quinta do Lago, Vale do Lobo, and the area in between — is beautiful. Wide roads. Golf courses. Villas with gates and hedges and pools you can hear but not see. Everything is clean, maintained, and quiet.
Really quiet.
An EO friend of mine put it well later: “Quinta is for when you’re in your 40s.”
As beautiful as it was, it didn’t quite seem to be a place where a young family with a 3-year-old builds a life. It felt very American, very suburbia, like we’d be driving everywhere. A bit too quiet for our taste.
If we wanted a pure American-style suburban lifestyle, this would obviously be the pick. But we’d lived in Europe for a decade. We wanted at least a little European flavor. Something with a bit of walkability and energy.
Quinta didn’t have that.
But what it did have was a bar called The Cheeky Pup.
Right across from the Conrad, this place was packed. On a random weeknight. In February. Full of expats, families, people our age — drinking, eating, being loud.
It was the first time on the entire trip that I thought: People actually live here. Year-round. Not just in the summer.
One of the waiters was incredibly helpful. We told him we were scouting the area, thinking about moving. He rattled off neighborhoods, gave us honest opinions, told us what to avoid. He lived in Quarteira himself.
We filed that away.
The Greasy Chicken
The next day we drove to Vilamoura.
The marina was dead.
It was a Tuesday. Or maybe a Wednesday. In February. Nobody was there because nobody is there in February. But we didn’t know that yet. All we saw was a ghost town.
And then we had lunch.
I don’t know how, with an entire marina full of restaurants, we ended up at this place.
Rundown looking. Weird energy. We looked at the reviews and thought — fine, it’s chicken, how bad can it be?
Bad.
The chicken was dry. And somehow also oily. It was genuinely awful.
My wife still brings this meal up. A year later. Every time someone mentions Vilamoura, she mentions the chicken. It has become the running joke of our entire Portugal search.
This was our first meal in the region other than the 5-star hotel.
Not exactly a promising start.
The Algarve Tour
Over the next few days, we drove everywhere.
We drove east to Tavira. Nice. Quiet. Too quiet. Felt like a place you’d retire to when you were done with everything else.
We drove west to Albufeira. Too touristy. The kind of place where every restaurant has a guy out front trying to get you to sit down. Pass.
We drove further west to Lagos. Beautiful town, and I could see the appeal for younger expats and couples. But the housing stock was mostly apartments. We wanted a house with a yard. Lagos didn’t have that for us.
We drove to Portimão. I’d had high hopes for Portimão.
Something about it on the map looked right — big enough to feel like a real city, close to the coast, seemed like it could work.
The apartment blocks lining the coast were massive. It felt claustrophobic in the same way Lisbon had, just with a beach attached. I didn’t want to look out my window at a concrete wall across the street.
But that beach…man, that beach.
We went back to Portimão a second time for the kartódromo — the international go-kart track near the Autódromo.
That was fun. I raced, spent €200, had a blast.
But fun to visit and good to live in are different conversations. Same lesson as Lisbon.
We even looked at Loulé, a bit inland.
I actually really liked Loulé every time we’ve visited. There’s a market, a real town center, local life. But it was further from the beach than we wanted, and the hills started creeping in again. We’d left Lisbon to get away from hills.
Faro was interesting but not what we wanted again. We’d already relocated across the world from California to Poland after fleeing the war, kid being born, and my mom passing. If we were going to move across all of Europe, with a toddler and dog…it needed to be really close to perfect (though no place is).
Faro, Tavira, Albufeira, Lagos, Portimão, Loulé. Six towns in five days.
None of them clicked.
And finally, something did.
And that’s for the next entry.