Day 1: Home to Faro

The trips we've had over the summer have been fun, but both Tanzania and Bosnia have felt more like adventures than relaxing holidays at times. When we saw cheap flights on offer in the Ryanair sale for November and December, we couldn't help but book another couple of short - but hopefully relaxing - trips before the end of the year. We set off on the first of these this morning, with a flight from Stansted to Faro in Portugal.

We've been to Portugal before but never to the Algarve, so this is going to be a new experience. It started off as a rather cold experience, as we left the house around 5am and drove down to Stansted through bursts of wintry showers. The more it seemed to snow (or, at least, sleet) the more sceptical I became that our flight was going to take off as planned, especially because Ryanair had helpfully sent me a video message the night before saying that they couldn't guarantee any flights due to the potential impact of snow and ice in the UK on Friday morning.

We made it to Stansted without incident, then had a long wait to get through security. The wait really shouldn't have been long at all, but despite the fact that they have just installed multiple new scanners (the posh ones, which don't require you to take anything out of your hand luggage, the airport unfortunately only seemed to have enough staff working this morning to operate one of them. That meant everyone in the airport was having to go through the same lane and it was seriously slow.

Never mind, I'd got us to the airport a bit too early anyway, so we still managed to get through with enough time to have breakfast and I was pleasantly surprised to find that all flights seemed to be running more or less on time despite the weather. Things did start to brighten up a bit and by the time our plane was due to depart at 09.40 it was pretty sunny. We were maybe delayed by 20 minutes or so, but that was a lot better than I was expecting in the circumstances

The flight to Faro took around 3 hours. We landed some time before 1pm and immediately felt a huge contrast in temperature as we stepped off the plane. Wow. The weather forecast had said it would be around 20 degrees and it really felt like it. We got unlucky with the queue we joined at passport control, getting stuck behind someone who seemed to have a complicated immigration situation, but before too long we were stamped in and picking up our rental car. Car rental in Portugal is incredibly cheap in November; we've paid less than £50 to rent a car for the weekend.

Our first stop was the town of Faro itself, which is only around 10km from the airport. We parked on the outskirts of the old town, not far from what seemed to be the old town walls.

The historic centre of the town is quite small and it didn't take us long to walk from here to the cathedral.

It was quite small as cathedrals go, but pretty and amazing to be somewhere with such a blue sky after a rather gloomy November back in the UK.

The square that the cathedral is in was very attractive too, though it was hard to get good pictures because there was quite a lot of parking.

One side of the square was lined with orange trees, which was quite amazing to see.

It was after 2pm by this point so we stopped at a cafe near the square to get lunch and couldn't resist a rather unconventional starter

We both had a pizza, then I had lemon ice-cream with a shot of limoncello for pudding which was really nice. Tim tried an Algarve speciality, which consisted of figs and almonds and seemed a bit dry.

We aren't staying in Faro itself, but in a place called Luz which is around 100km down the coast. After an hour or so we made it to the hotel and found we've got a lovely room with a bedroom...