Today we did a scenic drive from the guidebook called “Madeira’s Sunny Side”. We had storm force winds and torrential rain.

It was so bad that the airport was closed with no flights in or out.

The airport (which is named after Madeira's most famous son, the footballer Cristiano Ronaldo) is renowned as a dangerous place to land but on our flight I was confident as Jet2 don’t have a seat row 13, that was until Gill pointed out that as we were in row 14 it was actually the thirteenth and unlucky row.

So today we had an exciting drive dodging fallen trees and rocks and getting the odd shower on top of the car as in the picture on the right of the next car through.  It is a good job we were not in the Caterham.

The book suggested we have a dip in the famous salt water swimming pools in Porto Moniz. As you can see in the banner picture they had rather more water than usual.
The BBC weather forecast is good from tomorrow lunchtime onwards, lets hope they are right.

I could not resist photographing the picture of two nuns shown below, which was in a cafe. I do hope it is a real life snap and not staged although the nun on the left is so beautiful it might be a put up job.