How Looking for a Wine Bar May Have Saved Our Lives

A split-second choice during Storm Cláudia reminded us how the smallest decisions can become life-altering twists of fate.

Photo by the author.

Dear Readers,

I’ve written before about life’s strange timing, most memorably in my post “The Day We Almost Blew Up a Village,” a story from many years ago when Paul and I owned a country store in Rhode Island. That experience reminded me that fate has a way of intervening in our lives, often quietly and without warning. But a few weeks ago in the Algarve, during the powerful winds of Storm Cláudia, that reminder arrived in a much more dramatic way.

We were spending a long weekend in the Algarve, in part to attend Art Expo where a friend was exhibiting her work. The weather was unstable during our drive from Lisbon to Porches on Friday afternoon, where we had booked a hotel for three nights, with moments of torrential rain, high winds, and then clouds and sun. The weather reports said that most of the weekend would be this way and there were reports of extremely severe weather in the Algarve area we happened to be staying in.

But being the brave souls that we are, in the early afternoon on Saturday, the rain had let up, so we ventured out and headed towards Silves, where the art show was being held. It was about a 30-minute drive. The sky had turned a heavy, uneasy gray, the kind that makes you watch the clouds a little more closely.

As we left Porches, WAZE, the GPS app we most often use when taking a road trip, routed us onto a series of rural backroads – some narrow, and all unfamiliar, winding past farmland and long stretches of open space.

The wine bar sign.

A few minutes into the drive, I spotted a small sign pointing toward a wine bar I had read about earlier. On a whim, I asked Paul if we could take a quick detour to locate it. Perhaps we’d return later if the weather improved. He turned the car around without hesitation.

The wine bar sat quietly down a narrow village lane, shuttered for the afternoon. We noted the spot and about 10 minutes later we got back on the road towards Silves, returning to the route WAZE had chosen for us.

Not long after, everything changed.

As we rounded a curve, the landscape opened, and we were confronted with devastation. Acres of greenhouses lining both sides of a two-lane road were flattened. Structures twisted. Plastic sheeting collapsed onto thousands of tender plants. Fence posts were at an angle. Debris littered the ground in every direction. Telephone poles lay bent with wires hanging low enough for cars to barely pass under.

Besides us, only a couple of cars were on the road just slightly ahead of us and slowing to a crawl as drivers navigated the wreckage. One man pulled over to remove debris that was blocking one lane of the road. I rolled down my window, no rain at that moment, just an unsettling stillness, and took a few photos, trying to make sense of the destruction.

Photo by the author.

As we slowly drove by, the realization came. I said to Paul, “This just happened.” He agreed. We weren’t minutes behind this path of destruction. We were just behind it.

Had we not stopped to look for the wine bar, we would have been on this exact stretch of road at the very moment Storm Cláudia spun what we believe was a tornado.

An odd detail.

That thought stayed with us long after we reached Silves. And something else lingered, too, an odd detail we still cannot explain.

We traveled between Porches and Silves a few times over that weekend, yet WAZE never sent us along that rural road again. Not once.

We tried to retrace it later out of curiosity, but we could never find the same turn, the same greenhouse-lined stretch, or anything resembling the place where we had watched nature rearrange the landscape.

To this day, we have no idea which road we were on or why we never drove through it again.

Moments like these make me stop and think.

For me, moments like these serve as a reminder that so much of life unfolds in ways we only recognize in hindsight. A small choice. A brief detour. A few minutes gained or lost. These can alter the direction of an entire day, or perhaps something far bigger.

Some people call these moments twists of fate; others chalk them up to the universe stepping in, or even to guardian angels watching over us. Whatever the explanation, these experiences stay with you.

Just as that long-ago incident in Rhode Island taught us how fragile the ordinary can be, this moment on a rural Algarve road reinforced it once again: fate doesn’t always arrive quietly. Sometimes it reveals itself only after the danger has passed.

And on that stormy afternoon, that simple decision to look for a wine bar may very well have saved our lives.

Have you ever had a moment like this, when timing, intuition, or a small, unexpected choice changed the course of your day or your life? Leave a comment and tell me about it.

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Until next time…

Obrigada!

Carol.