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Caves and Tunnels and Kayaks, oh my

 Seeing Pointa da Piedade from above yesterday and a little bit from the water was great, but we knew we were missing out on the coolest things that are only accessible by water. When we returned home yesterday we decided to see if we could book ourselves some kayaks, which we did. We drove back to one of the beaches at Pointa da Piedade that is accessible from the cliff tops and met up with a van that was loaded with kayaks. We had 2 hours to go enjoy the coastline.

We had to launch our kayaks from the beach on the side that was covered in the nastiest, thickest seaweed. It was truly gross. We squished our way through and got loaded up. Then we struck out to explore. The cliffs, tunnels, and caves got more dramatic and stunning the further we went.

Cormac and I shared a kayak and we decided we make an excellent team probably from all the time we have spent playing video games together. We have definitely defeated Bowser many a time in multiple Mario universes. The girls and Ammon shared the other kayak. Ammon had the 1 phone we brought to take pictures for the first half of the adventure, then I took over. It is still not optimal to take pictures through a waterproof case, but then, it isn't optimal to have your phone get soaked because you were in a kayak on the ocean with it.


























We had to compete for space with a ton of motorboats giving tours of the caves and tunnels. That was a bit frustrating at times and the tour guides were clearly not big fans of kayakers, but we could get into spaces that were inaccessible to the bigger boats and it was a lot of fun to explore like that.















The color of the water in this part of the world is just amazing. The color also varies which makes it incredible to look at. The cliffs are also beautiful but when paired with the green and turquoise water it makes a truly incredible sight.




On our way back the tide had risen enough that we could go back inside the little cave we had been in yesterday when we swam in. We hadn't had a phone yesterday, so we snapped some pictures of our cave and explored around a little bit before finishing our journey back to our seaweed beach.






While we were hanging out in the cave Azure came across some sort of sea creature thing which she yoinked from the ocean. She does that. I looked it up, apparently these are cuttlefish eggs.


We were nearly back to shore when the wind hit us hard and sent Cormac's new hat into the ocean. I couldn't reach it and rather than turn the boat around so we could grab it, Cormac decided to bail out and capsized our boat. I wasn't able to get myself back into the kayak, so Ammon and Azure let me hang on to the back of their boat and they towed me the rest of the way in.

We turned in the kayaks and then drove back to Portimao where we grabbed some lunch. After lunch the kids and I went down to our beach here outside the Air BnB for a little while and Ammon went to get to work. We had some larger waves to play in today which was a lot of fun. The wind was blowing a lot though, so we came back home very sandy. The kids and I watched some of the Olympics (various events) and then I had to log in to meet up with clients as well. It was a pretty fantastic day.

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