So what now?

The two days walking with my friend, Bruce on the Portuguese Caminho do Santiago were very interesting.   

There are a number of pilgrimage paths to choose from if you want to take the pilgrimage and the trail from France is the most popular way to the Santiago Cathedral through Spain.

You wouldn't have guessed this from the number of fellow travelers we saw and met over the two days, but a walker who had walked from France before reported over breakfast one morning that it was more beautiful and easier on the feet than the Portuguese route we were walking.  Given the roughly square-shaped tiles that are so common on some of the Portuguese paths and roads, walking long distances over cobblestones like that can be hard on the feet.

But we found the scenery and the quaint towns to be very beautiful.  

The Portuguese route is not a recent trail, having been recorded by a cartographer in the 12 Century with two versions, one by sea and the other by land.  In the middle ages the pilgrimage routes were developed on roads and trails traced by the occupying Romans and then the Moors but the consolidation of the routes for the "Portuguese Way" was the pilgrimage of Queen Isabella of Portugal in the 14th Century.  Aside from her itinerary establishing significant stops, she also left money on her death for the development of inns and infrastructure to support pilgrims on their way - so the hike left a big impression on her.

Morning coffee and cake at this lovely cafe catering to pilgrims

The people of the region are courteous and respectful of pilgrims and as we have come to discover in our interactions with Portuguese people wherever we have been (excepting perhaps on the highways) the locals are friendly and eager to help if you need it.

After a day of hiking I stopped at a  pharmacy for some antacids and was presented with a small scallop shell by the pharmacist as I was about to leave after paying.

Bruce explained to me that the shell is a symbol of the hike and it is used in a lot of the signage and brochures.  Reputedly pilgrims would stop at the coast at some point either before or during their pilgrimage and pick up a shell - these distinctive shells are plentiful along the northern coast of Portugal and Spain and became a symbol of the trail.

An article describes how  pilgrims would use the shell as proof that they were on the pilgrimage and larger shells became practical objects as bowls for food and water.  The symbolism of the lines on the shell's outer surface represent all the different paths to Santiago.  There are quite a few legends and symbols that are associated with the shell which makes for interesting reading.

A Roman bridge on the Caminho route

Bruce and I stopped for lunch at a small café on the first day after I joined him.  We were verbally accosted by a group of humorous older women sitting at a table near the counter.  They were in high spirits and one of them said something about "rico" and "Euros" to us, but neither of us understood exactly what she was saying.  

A younger person sitting at a nearby table translated for us that this woman said we were millionaires with lots of Euros so we should give them some of it.

I was able to explain in faulty Portuguese (the lie) that I was homeless (it would have been true a year ago) and all I did nowadays was walk.  They were incredulous... "Really? You really don't have a home?" and I said, still in Portuguese: "My friend here is a very rich American, you should ask him". 

They were all laughing as I went out to get a table on the porch and Bruce, when he joined me said "Did you just try to set me up with a 72 year old woman?"

I suppose it is fair to say that the cafe attendant got the last laugh, because Bruce had stayed behind to pay for the meal and when I went in after we'd eaten she didn't say anything about the meal already having been paid for so we paid twice!  We only realized this as we were walking to the Inn where we were spending the night but I decided to let it go - the burgers were not very expensive but it did leave a bit of a sour taste in our mouths.  It also adjusted my sense of the helpfulness of locals to "they are kind, but keep your wits about you".

During our walk and in the evenings over beers, we ended up in conversation with many others who were also walking to Santiago.  Even though people are motivated to do this walk for a variety of reasons (not only religious) there is a sense that something pushed you to do the pilgrimage and the conversations in the evenings inevitably drifted to that topic.

I mentioned before that Bruce has been processing the grief of his wife's passing and the long illness that let up to it and he was willing to share this with fellow travelers. 

Bruce left a tribute to Michelle at a place with hundreds of mementos from other travelers

It made me think about what might motivate me to do the full hike.  I had a good non-specific reason for being there, which was to join Bruce and hang out with him for a couple of days.  

One couple (I think they were German) blurted out when they saw us at a stop that they had spotted us the previous night eating dinner at an inn, and at first they had thought we were a married couple because we were talking so animatedly.  Later they concluded that we must have been reconnecting after some years with lots of news to share.  It was just after I had arrived to meet Bruce but I did admit to them that I am very talkative anyway so it could have been that!

One of the hikers we met was walking with his wife and had taken the time to think through what was next for him - because, he said, after retirement he was driving his wife crazy.  This struck me because Anne and I have been working through adjusting to the new normal since I stopped working and some of it has involved a few (sometimes heated) conversations and re-calibrations.

Ever since I started working in hi-tech at Rhodes I have worked hard - I really loved the work and there has always been more to do than people to do it, so I worked long hours.  My sons told me at some point when they were in high school that they would not want to work with computers because it seemed that all I did was work.

I felt then that I had done them a disservice not making it clearer that a ton of the extra work I did, especially after hours was motivated by how much I enjoyed it. 

All of this work over the years was also very rewarding because it was like building and fixing puzzles (rewarding in itself) and would regularly be accompanied by acknowledgements from colleagues when these successes or problem resolutions were helpful to them too.

Anne has grown a little tired of me saying that my accolades now come from things like unpacking the dishwasher.   Its an exaggeration because there is a lot more that I have been doing but I suppose this a confession of not really knowing what I need to do to build value in my days.

Bruce at a milestone with a shell emblem - 200km to Santiago

I had thought that I would be exploring a few things after retiring.  Tech projects, writing and music were the top three but probably as important was ramping up my skills and tools to be able to do maintenance on our house.  I have made a little progress in each of these areas, but I think I have to adjust my view on how I find value in the things that I do to make up my days. 

The other big adjustment is how to structure my day.  It used to be so rigid and now is incredibly fluid.  I stopped setting my alarm after a couple of weeks (because, why?).  Now I wake up between 7am and 8am and the day stretches before me.

Anne and I discussed the domestic chores.  There have been periods since we left South Africa when Anne didn't have a paid job - at first in America she was not allowed to work and then, after teaching for 17 years she retired in 2019.  The division of labor during those years that she wasn't working was easy because I had these long days and so she naturally took on most of the cooking and cleaning.

Now we have divided things equally for cooking - week on, week off.

So my morning starts with reading news with coffee, doing some of the online puzzles, followed by some domestic maintenance tasks around the house and then cooking (if I'm on that week - if not I start earlier upstairs).

Afternoons, I'm working upstairs in my study on rediscovering songs I have lost along the way - I took up bass guitar a few years ago so I am working on both my acoustic guitar and my bass.  When I get tired of that I'm looking at youtube videos to figure out what we should do about heating our water, or some irrigation ideas for watering the garden in the summer.

In point of fact, there really is no reason that I should be asking for more than this.  The truth is that being able to retire and having to work out how to manage it is a privilege that many people don't have so there is that too!  It's like an extended holiday to be honest.  The biggest problem is my brain is so used to the reward system that I was embedded in for the 45 years of my working life.  Maybe I will just slowly adjust and chill out about it?

We had friends visit from Australia this past week.  Rob is one of a family of 4 brothers who I spent so much time with during most of my school life that my father used to make sarcastic comments about where I lived vs where my bed was.  In the beginning I used to walk the 20 min to their house every Saturday morning and would play or hang out with all of them - though their oldest brother, who is closer to my age, was my best friend through that period until we ended up on different continents as adults.  When we moved into high school both our families moved to the same street, four houses apart so I would just go over there after school every day unless I was forbidden (which happened a couple of times).

I met Eurika when I traveled to Australia for work a few years ago.  Anne had joined me for the tail end of that trip and we stayed at their home for a few days.

It was really cool to catch up with both of them and, since they were our first non-family house guests in Portugal to give them the tour of our discovered places in the Algarve.

Sailboat off the Algarve coast

It was also good to chat about projects - both Rob and Eurika have been working in their spare time on their property on a large piece of land that they bought and renovated and some of their waste recycling and water heating ideas were very interesting.

"Beach of the Valley of the Wolf" (Praia de Vale do Lobo) where we ate dinner one evening

We have been fixing our gate - I mentioned early on that the hydraulics of the gate had really damaged the pillars at the entrance to our yard and we decided to put in a new gate and widen the entrance to minimize the chances of cars being scraped on their way in.

I took a photograph of the sunrise one morning showing the container full of rubble and the concrete work from the almost completed new entrance in the foreground.

The new gate will be one that rolls off to the left rather than one that opens inwards.

Our hot water system has been keeping the water tank at about 45°C (113°F) throughout the summer but during their visit the temperature dropped to just below 40.  Rob mentioned to me that the plumber told him that 60°C was the ideal temperature for the water tank because it destroyes all bacteria.

Of course I went into research mode because suddenly I was worried that our water tank was a petri dish for bacteria.  Anne found a very interesting article detailing research into Legionnaire's disease in the UK which found that there were no instances of this from domestic sources, rather they are more common in spas and gyms where enough care is not taken to sterilize the shower heads or where the hot water tanks are so large that they don't get recycled during use quickly enough.  The author keeps their water at 45°C and justifies it based on their demography and water use.

I did light the fire in our kitchen wood stove to get the temperature up to 60°C even though it is still warm here.  Just in any case.

This highlighted for us that we need to revisit the hot water system.  It is not photovoltaic as I had previously incorrectly reported, but rather uses vacuum sealed pipes that generate a ton of heat when the sun strikes them.  A small pump carries water across the tops of these pipes where there are terminals that get heated by the pipes.

We don't have enough of these pipes to dramatically increase the temperature in the tank, but even if we added more, they are still all susceptible to overcast days.

We really need to either supplement them with something more effective that we can use with a secondary heat source (gas or electric) when the days are still too warm for the kitchen stove to tide us over a string of overcast days.

We are also second-guessing the wood stove in the kitchen because Anne is noticing that her asthma is triggered when the stove is running.  Wisps of smoke escape when we light the stove and sometimes when we add wood.

We'll leave that for a future project too because I have 5 tons of wood outside collected through the summer for our winter heat.

Today I had to fire up the stove again to get the water tank heat up.  It was 21°C (69F) outside so we had to leave the doors open to keep the house from getting too hot.

I decided to try to use the oven in the stove for cooking.  Getting the heat up in that oven is quite delicate and I'd have to work on the best way to build the heat up and then maintain it for as long as it takes to bake something, but for today I set the modest goal of roasting some vegetables to make a variation on ratatouille.  I toasted bread on the hot stove surface to serve on the side with garlic butter.

So what now?  

Using an oft repeated phrase from "The outlaw Josey Wales" which my friend, John used to quote to us when the grind of work seemed pointless:  "Endeavor to persevere" - and why not?  I have plenty of time to figure it all out!

Summer's end

I remembered how Kimberley summers felt during the two hottest months of summer in Portugal.  Temperatures didn't vary much over the few weeks - going down the 24ºC (75ºF) at night and burning a steady 35-38ºC (90-100ºF) during the day.

The days were actually not that uncomfortable - on the whole, excepting when the ubiquitous evening breeze and then the winds howling into the night took a break and left the night air still and hot.  The house stays cool if you close the doors and windows at around 10am.  You can open up again when the winds pick up in the evening so we used our air conditioners during a few of the windless nights but every other night we left the windows open for the breezes to cool us.

It is incredible how quickly you get used to these high temperatures.  We are feeling quite chilly now that the summer is almost over and the morning temperature starts at about 15ºC (59ºF).  It will be interesting to see how the winter feels.

We had all of our children and grandchildren visit this summer. 

A crazy but happy couple of weeks with high demand for trips to the beach.  

Over time my relationship with the beach has changed somewhat - I remember summer holidays in Kenton-on-sea and the Fish River that were idyllic as a young parent, but realized more recently that a big reason was that you could escape the sun and boredom of just sitting in sand to lounge with a book on the deck of the holiday house.  

Given that our house is 30min drive from the closest beach in Portugal these beach outings were, of necessity, extended affairs which were greatly enriched by an umbrella and collapsible camping chair that we bought to increase the likelihood of me joining everyone in the hot sand.

Quietness has returned after the flood of small bodies - the smallest of whom had me running in circles indoors in a nerf-gun war that ended suddenly when I ran around a corner and smashed my toes into a industrial strength glass door leaving one of them bloodied and swollen.  My grandson came to me every day after that to ask if I could run yet - my answer was always "nope"!  Fortunately the pain was mostly over after a day and I'm left with a toe that reminds me of the incident with a sharp pain if I tread on it in an unusual way.

Other than that, it tolerates being put into a hiking shoe and taken on long walks.

One of my hiking partners from some years ago when we were hiking the 40 4000ft mountains in New Hampshire is coming to Portugal next week to hike the Portuguese Caminho do Santiago - a variation on the famous Spanish pilgrimage route to the famous cathedral.

Bruce was a colleague of mine for a number of years but we developed a friendship at work and over the many hikes that we did together.

Bruce recently lost his wife to Alzheimer's disease and he had been walking steadily for months as a way to process what he described as "the long goodbye" as he took care of her at home over the few years of her decline.  After her funeral someone told him on an impulse that he should look into the Caminho and after some research he decided to take the time to walk in Europe. 

When I heard that he was planning to come over to hike I decided to join him for a few days - thinking (sensibly) that it was not really in me to do more than that.  I use the very obvious excuse that he'd get sick of me, following the advice my grandmother often repeated about fish and visitors going off after three days.

I started my preparation during the summer, walking in the mornings before it got too hot and trying to build up to the distances of the three initial days of the hike (which are 21,14 and 22km).

 Anne joined me for the shorter stretches which included an adventure when we inadvertently entered private farmland of lush avocado trees and were accosted by the farmer who chased us down in his truck and asked what we thought we were doing on his land.  Of course the language barrier being what it was, Anne blurted out for some unknown reason "Nous sommes perdus!" (we are lost) in French and I tried the mix of Spanish and Portuguese that sometimes works for me to say "we are trying to find our way home".

After our fence climbing adventure

We ended up having to hike to the bottom end of his farm and then climb over a house-high pile of rocks and over his fence to get off his property.  I pointed out to Anne that getting in on the other side had been deceptively easy but I lack the nuanced Portuguese to have pointed this out to the farmer at the time.

I scoped out a 15km circuit near our home which includes some lovely scenic views of the countryside.

During the shorter training walks we came across a variety of dogs - for the most part they are behind fences, but occasionally they run out an open gate behind you which is always a little freaky as they rush at your ankles barking furiously.

We took some dog treats along with us after the first couple of incidents, thinking that we could distract the dogs with the treats.  Unfortunately farm dogs will ignore the treat if you put it down and will dash off it you toss it over to them - which gave us an idea to use a trick we learned as children in South Africa - to bend over and pretend to pick up a stone - which sends the dogs scuttling off.

Anne has a hiking pole that she brings along with her and she passes that to me if we get close to dogs in the open and I just point it at them as we pass.  I'm not sure why I want the stick because I think we'd both be doing the same thing if they attacked - waving it at them and shouting, but at least we have a plan!

The scariest dog encounter was a group of three dogs who looked pretty mangy and ragged and were fairly far from any visible property line - we assumed that the house was in the bush some meters out of sight and the dogs had heard us approaching and came out to ambush us.

They looked intent on encircling us and kept on dodging in to get closer so I was doing some pirouettes with the hiking pole and fake picking up stones until we were out of their territory.

My second long hike was a 22.5km hike along the coast at the end of a famous coastal path called the Fisherman's Trail (or Rota Vicentina).  The end of the route is the train station in Lagos, Portugal and we began there and walked along the coastal cliffs to a lovely beach called Porto do Mos where we had lunch and Anne stopped to swim and soak up the sun while I continued to a beach town called Luz.

The total waking time on this longer hike was about four and a half hours but we took six and a half with the lunch break.

Luz from the top of the coastal cliffs

For those interested the Fisherman's trail is about 226km long and is usually walked over 13 days (17km average) with the longest stretch being about 22km.  There is a great interactive map from the link above that shows where food and sleeping stops here - a mixture of hostels, small hotels and small cafe-bars.  I know that some people bring a small tent along so that they can camp if they don't get to a hostel or hotel.

We'll park that as an adventure for another time!

Temporary resident

Monday morning early I was off to the Portuguese consulate in Boston.  The person who had helped Anne first, and had then handled my application was sitting at the reception window and very apologetically let me know that the entire computer system handling visa applications and visa issuing was down in Portugal for two days because it was being upgraded.

The previous weekend I had decided to change my flight from the 4th of July to the 8th to make room for error because of how short the week was with the July 4th celebrations, but it was disconcerting to learn that the visa would not be ready for at least two days.

Of course when they told me that the consulate general was not in the office that day I immediately extrapolated from that he might also not be in the office on Wed or Friday due to American holiday festivities which ratcheted up my anxiety a few notches.

Some good news did arrive in the form of confirmation that our driving records from the RMV were ready for pickup at the mail handling facility so my plan was to go into the city to see the Secretary of State on the Tuesday.

I decided to take an Uber to avoid the stress of having to find the building and having to find parking nearby.  In Boston you can easily pay $30 for parking for several hours so the Uber fee seemed like a reasonable compromise.

The building is right behind the imposing State House with its gold dome that faces over the one corner of the Boston Commons.  I had read up on the process to get the driving records "apostilled" and had filled in the online form and had made a check out to the state department as described in the online instructions. 

In reality, the entire experience was pretty pleasant compared to what I'd imagined given the warnings about how many forms you could bring and how you might have to leave them there if they didn't get processed by 4pm.

The room was fairly chaotic because it turns out there are a lot of people looking for apostilled documents for many countries.  The desk clerks were rotating to the counter calling out country names for people to pick up already processed documents, sending people off to the cashier to pay if they didn't have a check or a money order (two forms of payment that the web-site said were the only ones accepted), and calling on people in a line to step forward one at a time to hand over documents.

Columbia, Guatemala, Bolivia and a few European countries were called before I got to say "for Portugal" to the desk clerk who called me forward.

She took my check and pointed to the wall behind me and said "wait there" after pushing my carefully filled in form back at me (not needed), and then she vanished to her desk in a small office.  About 10 min later she handed me my folder with the completed documents.

One the way back I decided to take the Boston T which was fortunate because I was able to spot a sign on one of the street-side entrances with a questionable interpretation

and also stop at some places that filled me with nostalgia.

The State House of course, followed by a walk through the common to the State Street subway station and on to the Blue Line train which took me past our old home station, Orient Heights where I'd caught the bus to our first rental in Winthrop.

Our friend Gene had said that she was planning to take an evening ferry ride into Boston with a friend of hers and I should join them if I wanted to - we ended up having burritos for supper on a somewhat chilly, windy deck but with views of the airport,

Gene in the foreground getting ready to photograph the plane as well!

 the water tower in Winthrop

and a massive luxury yacht on the wharf.

I had lunch arranged with a colleague on Wednesday but had a phone call as I was getting ready to leave.  America has so many scams and ridiculous marketing calls that few people, myself included, answer their mobile phones when unknown numbers call them, but some instinct made me take the call.  It was the Portuguese consulate letting me know that my visa was ready to be picked up.

I raced into town and parked across from the consulate building and managed to make the pickup and get to my lunch meeting in time, feeling very much relieved that I'd now secured everything that I needed to return to Portugal where I can stay permanently (subject to one more appointment to get my residence card).

After lunch I went to Gillette stadium for what was probably my last opportunity to photograph the New England Revolution soccer team.  A privilege that I'd been enjoying since 2005 when a fellow camera club member had invited me to stand in for him while he was working at a National Park in the North West.

The evening was quite eventful because the media pass I was given was accidentally for a sportswriter and not a photographer so it did not give me field access.  I had to get the help of the person in charge of media liaison and then the head of stadium security to hand-write a pass for me and then tell all of the security personnel that my media pass was not fake.  Both of them were pretty busy in the lead-up to the game and I felt obliged to apologize for being so "high maintenance".  

At the end of the game as I was walking around to set up a spot to photograph the fireworks planned for after the game at least two security people looked and my pass and said brightly : "oh we were told about you!" 

As we've discovered before, traveling with gear that is not packed in a familiar container led to me realizing the next day that one of my really expensive camera lenses was missing!  I remembered having had it at the stadium for shooting the fireworks but could not remember seeing it when I got home.  That and the fact that the car I was borrowing ended up with a nail in one of the tires almost ruined my enjoyment of the 4th of July celebrations, especially the fireworks which I'd been looking forward to photographing. 

Another camera club friend had invited me to his brother-in-law's 4th of July barbecue. When I told him about the flat tire he offered to bring his battery-operated pump the next morning to get the car into a state where I could drive it to have it repaired.   I went out later on to take a look at the car after sending a few emails to the media liaison person and two of my sports photography friends asking whether the lens had turned up.  I reached under a seat and found the lens had rolled in there.  It is a black lens but it would probably have been revealed if I'd been a little less panicked and had used a flashlight during my two previous attempts to find it.

In the meantime, Anne had gone to England for a week to see our daughters (and their families) and Nick, and she flew back on the 4th to our empty house.  I took a screenshot of the security camera recording of her at the front door and called her to say welcome home despite not being able to be there to welcome her.

I arranged to see Matt on the weekend.  We met at this awesome restaurant at around the midpoint between Boston and New Haven.  It has lots of signed photographs of famous authors and has bookshelves lined with books on all the walls.  You can take 3 books from select shelves if you have a meal there.  The only problem is how long it might take to select the three since most people there are stopping for a bite on their travels.  In the end I found one book which I thought (in vain as it happens) that I might read on the way back to Portugal.   After lunch we took a walk around a nearby lake.

With all the admin tasks and the trip to see Matt, I didn't get to see many of the people I would have liked to see this time around.  This was possibly the last trip to the USA for a while.  My errands mostly involved taking care of things to prepare to move my primary residence to Portugal.  My tax residency will move to Portugal as well which means that next year (and forever more) we will have to file taxes both in America and Portugal as ex-patriot Americans.

My last trip over the Nahant causeway was an opportunity to take one more photograph of that view with the evening sky and a plane coming in to land at Logan airport.  This last trip was tinged with sadness but I was very happy to be on my way back to Anne and my new home.

I discovered on my flight back from Boston that, probably because I had reserved an aisle seat early on, no one had taken the two seats next to me.  I thought this was fantastic but discovered that with the combination of my body clock (it was early evening when we took off) and the 5 and half hour flight duration I would have scant chance of sleeping even though I did lie down across the 3 seats for 30 min or so to try my luck.

I proudly informed the customs officer that I had a temporary residence visa in Portuguese after which I opened the passport to the page because he had no idea what I had said.  "Bit by bit" our Portuguese teacher says but this was not one of those bits, it was pure incomprehension.

But it was a big relief to know, once he stamped the page opposite the visa, that I was not going to have to leave Portugal every 3 months anymore.

I arrived in Faro at around mid-morning and insisted on staying awake all day which meant that Anne had to tolerate my zombie mode until 9:30 that night.

So on to the next adventure - settling in and exploring!

California: RV Life

In San Francisco I took an Uber to an RV park near to the airport to meet my friend Kees.

Kees had planned stops at 3 different RV parks to give me a flavor for the different options for RV camping.  We had chosen to find locations north of San Francisco.

I remember how I used to love driving our VW Kombi in Grahamstown, stepping up into the front seat and sitting more or less at the head-height of the other drivers on the road.  Stepping into Kees' RV to drive to our first campsite was a couple of notches above that.  The RV is as big as a single-decker city bus and is towing a small Suzuki Samurai jeep (also known as a Barbie jeep).

The road was mostly highway and we drove north through San Francisco over the bay bridge.  The fog was in and we could barely see the bridge until we were right on it.

The view from the other side was quite amazing - I did a double take at the floating city looking back after we had crossed the bridge.

The scenery north of San Francisco is beautiful.  I ended up taking many photographs from the RV - another advantage of sitting so high above the ground.

Our first campsite was purpose-built for RVs, but as much used by people with tents and other mobile camping arrangements.  We were completely off-grid which meant we had to use a generator for electricity (within the designated hours) and we had no water supply so used the on-board water tank.

After we had parked and pulled the Barbie jeep into the front of the RV Kees left the RV running while he extended the wall near the front which opens up to make a comfortable space for a sitting/cooking room.  The sofa in this section folds out to make a comfortable bed.

At the back is a similar slide-out that extends to make a comfortable bedroom with a double-bed.  There are two panel doors that slide out to separate the rear bedroom and the front of the bus - in between them is a toilet, basin and shower.

For those of you wondering - because I did too - the toilet is fully functioning but there was no way on God's earth I was going to use it in that confined mobile camper for anything other than my regular night-time trips for less serious business.  It turns out that this is a general rule given that most campsites have ablution blocks with toilets and showers and if you time your visit to just after they have cleaned them in the morning you have a fairly tame experience.

Kees promised that he would show me later in the trip how to empty the grey and black water.  No further explanation was necessary once he explained that grey water is from the shower and sink, and black water is from the toilet.

The campsites are populated by many happy people who were generally very friendly.  Kees makes it a habit of socializing with new people at every site and we stopped to chat to a couple of people while we were there.

The site is right in Bodega Bay situated on the San Andreas fault line and has beautiful views on both sides.  Facing across an inlet on one side

and across the bay on the other side.  

I was pretty jet-lagged for the first few days so I struggled to stay awake until 9pm but was wide awake at around 5am every morning so had a walk on the pre-dawn beach after our first night.

There was a fog horn out in the bay with some sort of timer on it that made a bhaa sound at fairly short intervals.  When Kees came through in the morning I discovered that I'd dodged a bullet in the middle of the night because in his semi conscious state he had reached the conclusion that the sound was my cell phone on vibrate receiving txt messages from family 8 hours ahead of us.  Fortunately the misapprehension was short-lived and he didn't come through to visit hell on me.

Our next stop was along winding narrow cliff-side roads that had been damaged by the rain and mudslides in recent months so we were stopped a few times to go on single-lanes with excavation and building equipment blocking the other half.

My jet-lag innoculated me because I didn't feel anxious at all but then again I wasn't driving.  I lazily remarked how close the RV was to the edge of my side of the road, not realizing at the time that it was very close to the edge on the driver's side as well.  

The Barbie jeep is attached to the back with a metal structure that forces the steering to move with the turns but Kees was concerned that the jeep was not turning as well as it should have been.  It is a very light vehicle so we wouldn't have felt it and it would have simply dragged the wheels.  Later in the trip I filmed the jeep from the inside as we drove around an RV park and it looked as though the wheels were turning just fine.

We arrived at the next campground (Gualala) in the late afternoon.  It was pretty incredible, nestled in the valley of one of the redwood forests that grow north of San Francisco.  

I remember reading how these redwoods are a single organism, joined together with their extensive root system.  They are majestic and magical.

The next morning I woke with a message that my temporary residence visa was ready at the consulate.  After all the anxiety about having to wait in the USA for them to complete processing I was free to return as planned.

I had one other admin task to do - that was to get the signed/apostilled driving records for both of us to replace our USA driving licenses for Portuguese ones.  Anne and I managed to apply for the certified driving records online and so it would be a waiting game to see if they arrived by mail in time for me to get them processed before the July 4th weekend.  Many companies close for a 4 day weekend if July 4th is on a Tuesday or Thursday so my worry was that we only had the 3 days of the week to complete the additional tasks.

In the meantime, though, nothing could be done and I was a lot calmer knowing that my worst case now would be having to book another ticket one or two days later rather that my earlier fears of being stuck waiting for weeks for the visa.

This second campsite had a hookup for water and electricity and we enjoyed a few bike-rides to visit the town and the coastal cliffs nearby. 

We also visited an art center near the campsite that had a couple of exhibitions.

We got some firewood for the second evening and Kees prepared a great meal on his outdoor gas griddle.  The next morning the coals were still hot so I stoked up a new fire for our morning coffee.
 

Our neighbors were from Mexico but have lived in the USA  for something like 30 years.  Kees and I both had separate pleasant conversations with them on our first night which was also their last night there.  They told us that they have been coming to this particular campsite for years.  They sat around their fire singing - the couple and their adult daughter - after I went to bed.

We drove back to a different campsite in Bodega bay after our two nights.  Kees decided that we might be able to drive more comfortably if we unhitched the jeep and I followed him in convoy.  I was totally game for that.  The little jeep reminded me of the clunky army jeep I had driven many years ago in the army so it was quite nostalgic. 

We stopped a couple of times and I took photographs of the interesting rock pinnacles that are remnants of collapsed cliffs in the sea along the coast.

Our last stop was in an RV park arranged more or less like a parking lot.

The aesthetics weren't great and we had a noisy neighbor (on the other side of the park) who was holding forth on his political views until I got the portable speaker out and drowned him into the background with some 70's hard rock.

The scenery outside of the park made up for the rather dull setting inside.  We went on bike rides to overlooks and hiked to and along a beach.

Something surprising to a new visitor in northern California is how generally cold it is along the coast.  There is a cold breeze (usually quite strong) blowing much of the time and I found that I had to have my mid-layer winter jacket with me most of the time.

On our last night there we were sitting outside and a family of hawks came to the nearby tall trees.  I was able to take a couple of photos of one of the parents coming back from scouting and calling to the chicks.

After two nights Kees dropped me in Santa Rosa where I caught a bus to San Fransisco only to realize after one stop that when I had changed my inbound flight at Kees' suggestion, I had not changed my original outbound flight from Sacramento!  When we were planning the trip we had originally thought I'd join Kees in Reno and fly out of Sacramento. 

I had to get out of the bus and order an Uber for a rather expensive 2 hour drive to Sacramento.  The alternative google-suggested route involved a bus, train, bus and then another bus via Oakland which would have taken me 5 hours.  My driver was a sweet Nepalese woman studying computer science at a local university and so we had a wonderful conversation about Nepal, Nepalese food, computers, AI and life in general.

My flight left at just after midnight so I was going to arrive in Boston like I had in California, exhausted and having to fight sleep all day to adjust to the new timezone.