Christmas 2025 : Funcho walk and O Gralha Lunch

 Christmas 2025  : Funcho walk and O Gralha Lunch

Back in the days of yor , when  most of the current WAGS were regular AWW walkers, blogs were more esoteric : a lot of erudite discussion ( waffle?) and, almost as an aside, a few phrases along the lines of " we went up some hills, then down, had lunch and ended with a drink". These days , the latter gets expanded and the former ceases to exist. Perhaps this New Year we can revisit these old ideas, pehaps starting with an EXTREMELY belated blog of last December's Christmas frolic...otherwise known to Agatha C fans as "The Tale of the stolen Javali."

To begin....the usual coffee in the sun at O Gralha:

with Ros waxing about the Dutch coffee cups.

Nothing to do with the new owners origin ; a lovely lady from Moldova whose Portuguese ( says Ros) is worse than her English. But then she is a good cook and has changed the  closing day of the restaurant from a wednesday to a monday . Bad luck for my monday CVO rambler walks and lunches, Good News for AWW lunches.

18 came for the walk, usual crowd including Moura and Carol...plus Toby of course.

We set off by the snail farm, Peter wondering if we could ask for a tour...

Now that Alan our resident official photographer was back in harness, here is an example of his signature photo of walking derrieres...

The  Funcho was the fullest some of us had seen, so we stood to admire:

Jan had commented on my  previous walk that there weren't enough hills....though strangley  did not volunteer to go up here, which we had done in the distant past. Peter did volunteer, but he  would have been on his own .

This is beginning to sound a bit like " we went up some hills, then down, had lunch and ended with a drink", so had better say we got back to O Gralha to be joined by not only  Ken and Miriam , but Maria, a regular WAGS  walker but not seen on AWW for some time. Lovely to have her back with us. Some donned their Christmas Jumpers, with not an arrow in sight....

We had a rather exotic array of starters......we think this was some sort of baccalau...

And a rather copious supply of wine...

I think this was a toast to the AWW...

Not too sure about this one....

However, to get back to the alternative title.....where was my javali?7 were ordered, 7 delivered, but someone down the other end of the table must have mistaken javali for roast pork. The culprit remains unkown!

I managed to remember to thank the various Mrs's Kitty ( Jan, Ros, Julie, Miriam) and Ros for organising the lunch. ( I could digress on the plural  of Mrs Kitty.....not Mrs Kittys or Mrs Kitties, google thinks Mmes Kitty or perhaps Mses Kitty.....take your pick). Plus all the walkers and especially the leaders ( bit of a dying breed....3 current ones are injured, putting an extra load on those remaining)  Ros kindly presented me with a bottle :

Stephen kindly recalled the walk stats :

So, many thanks for reading this far ( if you have) and for another successful AWW year. Roll on 2026 and may our many injured colleagues soon get back to full health.

Thanks to alan for photos.

Geoff