Catching up on Bondi beach

Family holidays can lose the magic when the kids hit the the teenage years. Never one to give up, Tommy Barker tries to recapture the good old days with his two grown-up children in the Algarve.

There's one great thing about taking grown-up children (read: twenty-somethings) on a short family holiday — they’ll buy you ice-cream. As they stretch their young adult wings, they might even splash out for a beer or two for Dad, or even more thoughtfully, a bottle of rehydrating water for the flight home. Aaah, bliss; simple pleasures, being minded, role reversal. Weird, though.

Most parents would go to the end of the world for their beloved offspring, no matter what ages they are. In the case of a short and select — ie, just three of us able to travel — family trip to the Martinhal Beach Resort in Sagres, Portugal, we travelled to the end of the known world. Well, at least it was the end of the world as it appeared to Europeans, back in the Golden Age of Discovery, in the 15th century.