When a GPS gets lost and quits: Part 3

There are few modern betrayals quite as personal as a GPS deciding it no longer believes in you.

After being officially abandoned somewhere in the Algarve, I made the classic mistake of thinking: it couldn’t possibly get worse.

The GPS, naturally, disagreed.

To keep things brief (and, in hindsight, optimistically so), our electronic guide had what can only be described as a full breakdown. Not just a malfunction – more of a quiet resignation. No warning. No drama. Just… done.

After a long and increasingly confused sequence of dusty roads, wrong turns, and our own enthusiastic but entirely useless instructions, it finally gave up altogether and froze.

At that point, the rural hotel we were aiming for had stopped feeling like a destination and started feeling more like something someone had made up to get rid of us. We did arrive in the end, though “relief” would be overstating it. Let’s just say it wasn’t quite worth the journey.

We left a day earlier than planned, in part because Sue had started having rather convincing dreams involving Jack Nicholson from The Shining – never ideal when you’re meant to be enjoying rural hospitality.

Still, the Algarve countryside itself is another story entirely. It has a quiet charm to it – beautiful in a way that doesn’t need much explaining. There are small villages, a rich local food culture, and landscapes that look like they know exactly what they’re doing. The Portuguese, as ever, are excellent hosts, and the wine scene is quietly improving in all the right directions.

Tavira, in particular, has become a bit of a refuge for us. A reset button.

The Hotel Don Rodrigues is a big part of that: clean, unfussy, comfortable, with a refreshing pool and breakfasts that are far better than they need to be. And the cakes – proper cakes. Not the polite kind. Cakes to die for. The kind you remember.

Even Sue, who normally treats dessert like a strategic decision, made an exception. That alone tells you something.

And the staff are exactly what you want after a minor navigational collapse – calm, friendly, and completely unbothered by guests arriving slightly mentally defeated.

Somewhere between all this, I started thinking about how dependent we’ve become on technology just to get from A to B.

There was a time when you just… read the world. Sun, wind, stars. All still there, still working, still doing their job properly.

People crossed oceans without a voice calmly telling them to “recalculate.”

You just had instinct. Attention. And, probably, whisky.

And the odd thing is, you only notice how much of that we’ve lost when something like a GPS quietly gives up and leaves you on your own again.

Peace, love, and trust your internal GPS.