For our final day on Terceira, we rented a car to drive around the island. It isn’t a large island so it felt like this was pretty doable in a day. We picked a car up as soon as the rental spot opened up and tried to head off. We assumed it would be easy and didn’t get a map going. It’s not a big town and we just needed to stick along the water. But that didn’t go as expected. After we got further into a residential neighbourhood, we put a map on and got ourselves back on track.
From there, it was pretty smooth sailing. The island is made up of all these little villages, mostly along this one coastal road and they just flow into each other so as soon as you leave one, the next one is right there. It was a beautiful day for a drive and we enjoyed seeing these cute little villages. We stopped a few times, once at a lighthouse and once in one of the slightly larger villages (it had a bank!) before making it to the other large town on the island, Praia da Vitória. This was a charming little down and after wandering along the waterfront and to some of the historic buildings, we sat at a waterfront cafe for a very long lunch, since it had taken us very little time to drive around the island.
With lunch in our bellies, it was off to some caves - Algar do Carvão & Gruta do Natal. Algar do Carvão is actually a volcano that you get to climb down inside. I think it might technically be a vent? I’m not sure. But you get to climb down. It was very damp and felt like it was raining after we descended but it was so neat to see the landscape change from these lush green plants to the volcanic rock. Then, it was on to Gruta do Natal, a set of caves where they celebrate a Christmas mass each year. The caves are quite small and so you have to wear a hardhat inside, which came in handy in several spots, including a very small and narrow section that isn’t much more than about 2 feet tall.
Then, it was back to Angra - and one last dinner. We revisited the excellent spot we went to a few nights ago and each had the fresh fish again. I had trigger fish and EDP had forkbeard, which I believe is what he had the other night, as well. It was much busier tonight with a different waitperson and while the food was still excellent, the atmosphere wasn’t quite the same. We took our time wandering back to the hotel, enjoying the quiet town one last time.
Today, we made our way back home. We were, again, very early for our flight but the airlines systems were down so we waited for quite a long time to be able to get our bags dropped and boarding passes. They eventually had to start tagging bags and writing boarding passes by hand, but they must have gotten things back up at some point because many people on our flight had a printed boarding pass. The hand-tagged bags caused a bit of confusion in Ponta Delgada - obviously, they couldn’t check them through to Toronto as they were but because we had checked in online, they were registered in the system as going to Toronto. It took a few minutes but they eventually figured out how to cancel and recheck our bags. The flight back to Toronto was practically empty - we had no one in front of us, no one behind us, no one beside us… Definitely the emptiest flight I’ve ever been on and a nice surprise. Once back in Toronto, EDP got selected for random COVID testing but despite what we had been seeing in the news, the airport was fairly empty and it was a really quick detour to get him tested.
All-in-all, it felt great to be travelling again. We stayed masked-up when we were indoors but cases are quite low and with tourists generally needing to have negative tests and be vaccinated, the risk felt quite low. With a successful trip under our belts, I think we’ll be venturing out again soon - I heard rumours of another snowboard/city trip somewhere in Europe this winter. And you know I’m not going to say no to that!
