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trip out of my chronic state of motherhood and on to some fresher version of myself. Or back to a former one. I began looking into flights to some place warm. Apart from Mexico.
    It turned out that the cheapest fares flew to the Algarve, in southern Portugal. This happened to be a country I travelled through in my twenties, on my own. There was a romance involved too, with someone I had met on the road. I still kept a stash of his letters in my office.
    So when I came across a listing for a charter flight and an apartment in a mountain village not far from my old haunts, I booked them both. A solo trip might remind me of how normal and benign life on the road can be. At the very least, it might pry me off email.
    Brian endorsed my getaway, a bit too enthusiastically I thought. Maybe we all needed a break from family.

The Road
    A T THE FARO AIRPORT, I step out into the soft, bright early morning air,where Brenda, the agent I had found online, is waiting for me. She’s my age, short and robust. A few years ago, fed up with the winters in Dorset, she moved to a village near Alte, where she lives alone with her corgis in a renovated church.
    Hmm. Is this my new template? Other women I know are heading off to treks in Bhutan or ashrams in India. Instead I’m going to drive a rental car around a place I’ve already been, famous for olives and unbearably sad music, while I try not to worry about my son.
    I grip the wheel of my navy blue Corsa and follow Brenda’s SUV along the expressways and roundabouts of Faro as the roads circle, ascend, narrow, and then deteriorate. My eyes want to shut; they think it should be night. We climb away from the coast with its high-rises and golf courses into the sparsely populated hills— dry, brown, rugged mountains, worn down like molars, domesticated by centuries of farming. Not Canada, raw and unauthored.
    As we drive north, I think about the turn life had taken on my first flight to Portugal, in 1971. I was 25.
    We were in the “smoking section” of the plane, a conceptual corral marked by an imaginary line through the airspace of the cabin. I rummaged around for my blue packet of Drum tobacco and rolled him one too. We smoked our cigarettes and talked some more, about Neil Young, Günter Grass and Hermann Hesse. He seemed smart and charmingly jaded for his age, the same as mine. Then we went back to reading. Elbows touching.
    I had spotted him in the check-in line; his hair was long and blond like mine, only more ragged, and he wore purple bellbottoms frayed at the hem, a white Indian shirt, and mirror aviator shades. The more dandyish style of the London hippie, with a whiff of old money too, perhaps. I was wearing a rose-coloured shirt from Biba’s and a patchwork vest I had made out of scraps of my old clothes, including the bad turquoise prom dress and the lining from my mother’s fur coat.
    I contrived to sit beside him on the plane. It turned out that he had worked as a journalist in London, although he was already disenchanted with the scene.
    â€œA seedy lot,when you get down to it,” he said. I didn’t mention that I earned my living, such as it was, writing book reviews for a newspaper.
    When we landed in Lisbon, there was an awkward stretch as we left the plane and I didn’t know whether to walk beside him. Passengers rushing to make their connections jostled around us. As we came to a Y in the corridors he turned to me.
    â€œYou’re staying a while in Lisbon, then?”
    â€œYeah, at the hostel. I’ll check out the city for a few days, then probably hitchhike south to Sagres.”
    He gestured up the other arm of the hall. “I’ve got to catch my flight, but if you end up in the area, come find me. I’m staying in the hills north of Faro, near São Brás de Alportel. Ask after the inglês in the village; anyone will tell you the way.”
    I tried to memorize the name of the village, but the slurry