Flying solo

About a week after arriving we heard that Anne's visa was ready at the Boston consulate so, they said, she could come in and have it stamped into her passport.

Of course because we were impatient we had decided to come here rather than waiting longer in Massachusetts.  We didn't really know how long it would take them to get back to us with all the delays we have been hearing about and the house had been sitting empty for months.

It turned out that contrary to our expectations, getting flights back to Boston at short notice was going to be very expensive so we thought Anne should go to England for a few days and use a courier to get the passport to a dear friend who had agreed to take it in for her and courier it back.

Our little hamlet is known to be populated by a lot of Swedish retirees and I was invited to join them for a "thirsty Thursday" meetup on the night after dropping Anne off at the airport.  There are a number of Swedish people in the surrounding Hamlets as well and it was very nice to be welcomed so warmly by the groups of people who were having drinks down the road from us.  I know if Anne had joined me she would remember all manner of details about them afterwards.  I remember a few names and will be able to place some of the faces but it might take a couple of these gatherings before I get to know them.

View from the front window - the sea in the distance out of sight

One of the people there knew the people who did the first round of renovations of our house and she described them in such loving terms and told me how much they loved the house until they eventually split as a couple and she went back to England.  So it was very encouraging to hear people being so positive about the hamlet and about the house.

Meanwhile we had started to see cracks in our plan to courier the passport to America.  The waybill showing a UK address as the origin notwithstanding, the courier computer system registered the billing address as American and decided that the parcel (in England) could not be routed between an American address and another American address and so the parcel was sent to "Hotel California", which is a hub in England somewhere a little east of Birmingham and it had never left.

The tracking information however, was updated to show the package arriving two days later and so it wasn't until at least 5 days (with a weekend in the middle) and a 3 hour call, that Anne discovered that the parcel was still at the hub in England.

Luckily Anne did manage to get someone on the phone who cared and was able to update the source address to the one on the waybill.  I told a friend in technology that her parcel had been NATed to an un-routable return address which is pretty funny for a network person but I guess would fall flat everywhere else, including here.

So I was going to be left on my own in Portugal in our tiny hamlet in this new house for more than a week.

At first it was totally fine.  There are so many projects here and I made short work of a few of them on the first weekend.  Drilling holes into brick to mount things on the wall, assembling a wine rack and (shoot me now) applying coat after coat of white paint to a room that had one end painted dark blue with glow in the dark stickers of stars and moon.  

To be fair the moon and stars were pretty nice but we (Anne) did want to paint the room yellow and compromised with me to only paint two of the walls.  I suspect that all four walls might eventually be yellow in a process of attrition but in the meantime, white to cover the blue to prevent the yellow from turning green.

I picked up our new car on the day after Anne left.  It is a gasoline hybrid Toyota but an earlier model (2017) so it is missing some of the newer features, but has the advantage of having a fairly low mileage.

It allowed me to discover some of the shopping in our vicinity - we had already found the big specialist supermarkets that sell household electronics, or that sell hardware and tools, garden center and of course, the big general purpose supermarkets but there is a big shopping center about 30min drive from us that has cinemas as well.

We had missed seeing Dune before we left so I decided to treat myself to a movie experience.  In Portugal the English films are not dubbed, the original soundtrack is intact and there are Portuguese subtitles.  Of course, it didn't occur to me that the same would be true for any other foreign languages including the Fremen language.  The English subtitles of the original had been replaced by Portuguese subtitles.  The Fremen talk to each other a lot in this movie!  Fortunately the acting made a what they were saying more or less obvious but it was more than disconcerting as my eyes searched for some semblance of meaning when they talked only to find that I knew maybe one or two words in every twenty!

Our house has these occasional loud sounds - like a "clunk" that have sometimes been resolved by discovering that the mosquito mesh door in the front or back is banging because it wasn't latched properly and similarly the door on the "engine room" which doesn't lock because it is slightly misaligned.  We also have storm shutters that can bang if you don't properly wedge them into the guards on the wall that are intended to hold them open.

So we've gone searching each time we here a sudden noise and satisfied ourselves as some point that it was one of these offenders.

Sitting alone in a countryside house, watching TV at night, is another story though.  The sudden noise does come with a small chill up your back.  I'm pretty good at convincing myself that it was a crack from wood in the wood stove, or one of the above usual offenders so it wasn't until last night at about 1:30am that two bangs in quick succession woke me.

My ears have been blocked and have taken to ringing and I somehow convinced myself that I could hear talking outside in the midst of this.

At this point the chill wasn't small - all alarm bells were ringing along with the ringing in my ears as I padded down the passage to look out of the front window and padding back to my room to look out of the back of the house.    I had no idea where these two loud sounds had come from.

I had left the front outside light on so I turned on the back outside light as well and after peering out of the windows a little longer I turned them off and lay awake listening as carefully for more sounds as well I was able until I fell asleep again.

It has been getting colder and raining.  The photovoltaic system is pretty good as heating water when it is sunny, even during the cold.  Overcast is the enemy and so this morning I lit the stove again to get some hot water into the tank.  The water temperature has steadied at around 40°C with the sun but I know it won't stay there if I don't give it some help.

View out the back window

I double-checked the engine room door and the two mosquito doors and they were both tightly shut, so you can imagine my surprise after breakfast when I again heard the loud "clunk" that had woken me in the night.

I has been windy the last few days to be fair, but the sound appears so randomly.   I went outside again and waited and sure enough, one of the storm shutters was loose and blowing in the wind.

I was so sure that we had wedged it under the stay that keeps it against the wall but on closer inspection I saw that the stay has this little lever that you have to clip upwards to force it to hold its position - with the lever down the stay just gives way under pressure.

So.  Mystery solved.

Although it there is a clunk tonight, I don't know what I'll do.

Some lessons

Settling into the new home and  surroundings has been a bit of a roller coaster.

The wood stove oven (and central heater) does a nice job of heating the house but turning on the under floor heating puts some strain on its ability to maintain the tank temperature at a level that makes for comfortable showers.

A tank temperature of 30°C yields a luke-warm shower while 40°C is on the edge of being hot enough to make you wonder if you should turn on a little bit of cold.

Maintaining the wood stove during the winter takes effort.  It is much like the wood stove we had in our previous house in that regard.  It was raining quite a bit in our first week so we didn't had a good chance to see how the sun influenced the temperature of the water.  The photovoltaic cells on one or two days were generating enough heat to at least contribute a little to the effort.

The underfloor heating is on a separate circuit and so we have learned to turn it off overnight so that the cooling oven is still able to maintain the water temperature.

As it has warmed, the photovoltaic system and wood stove working together have driven the temperature up to 60°C.   When we arrived the tank was at 20°C after no external heat for about 3 months so if we can maintain the tank at 60°C if could make the floor heating more effective and less of a drain on the heat and allow us to have comfortable showers!  We'll have to see.

Each of the toilets have a small hose and a spray gun which, let's just say, have been an interesting experiment in alternatives to toilet paper.  The taps in two of the bathrooms can be adjusted to warm the water, but given our first week's experimentation with heated water this is also something I haven't felt justifies waiting for the water to run hot.   The effect is a little alarming and I have a love-hate relationship with the practice.  I suspect I'll warm to it over time.

We have needed a lot of things.  The previous occupants stripped most things that we'd have expected to be left.  Mirrors, some light fittings and shelves in the built-in cupboards were all removed.  

So we have made multiple trips to the local hardware store, eventually caving towards the end of this week to buy some power tools which I have put to good use:  mounting brackets in the under-stairs storage room for brooms etc and moving the TV wall mount downstairs.  There will be many more little projects that will no doubt occupy weekends for a good while to come.

I have never really considered myself a handyman although I do have a few projects that I completed in our first house in South Africa.  I was pretty happy to see in the realty photographs that went up for our old house in Cross Street, Grahamstown that the built-in cupboards and book case in one of the front rooms are still intact.

The big problem with not being quite handy enough is starting a project that quickly deteriorates into disaster.  My worst moments involved floods of water under a kitchen sink where I had just replaced a seal or when I stripped a bolt deep in a cavity of the engine of a car we owned.

It seems almost certain that living in Portugal is going to involve lots of handiwork and I had a pretty successful weekend with a succession of projects that involved drilling holes into concrete and mounting brackets and hooks for various objects.  I learned how to replace a lock on the garage door - which turned out to be pretty simple once I watched a you-tube video on the topic.

We also did a little exploring in the farmland near our house - we are right on the edge of the hamlet so we are able to amble along a farm road just outside our gate.

The rain has been good, given the news about how long the drought has been in the Algarve.  It is funny how your attitude towards rain changes based on the knowledge of how rare it is.  We have welcomed it and have marveled at how the landscape has greened and how many little flowers have sprouted up all over the place.

The soil here is very rocky.  In the distance in the photograph above is a roughly 5ft (1.5m) wall comprised of huge rocks that appear to have been dug from the ground.  The rocks vary in size but some of them are as big as a fridge.

It is going to make things interesting for us as we look at garden projects.

On one visit to the hardware store Anne and I had a moment where our strategies for planning projects collided.  I'm fairly conservative in my approach - picking the first thing that I think we need to do and then working on that till it is accomplished before looking at what's next - a natural offshoot of my technology work.  Anne has the whole vision and is quite happy to get everything that she imagines we need before starting on it.

So we found ourselves arguing in the hardware store because we had decided that we wanted to put up a circular wash line.  Anne was loading the cart with all the necessary components and implements needed to install one (the wash and its base, spades, picks etc.).  I on the other hand wanted to buy only a spade and a pick - thinking that our first step was to dig a hole and was determined to only do that step before looking for the rest of the inventory.  I mean, honestly, what if we can't even dig the hole?

We've been together for long enough for this not to have been a crisis, but it did take a minutes of heated explanations on both our parts.  Anne's point of view prevailed as it often does in these situations and we arrived back home with all we imagined might be needed to complete the project.

We took a while to dig the hole because after we determined that the ground is very rocky we also started to wonder whether there are any electrical cables buried in some shallow trench where we had planned to dig.  So we left it for a few days before resuming with caution.

Another huge expense has been getting a car.  We sold our two cars last year and have kept the money aside for what we'll use in Portugal - even so, it is tough to lay out that much money in so short a time.  Probably no surprise that we went over our budget for the car by about a third to buy a second hand hybrid.  We justified it with the knowledge that the more expensive car will be very fuel-efficient.  Fuel is costly here at around 1.74EU per litre (that's about $7US per gallon).  We should have the car later next week.

In the meantime, Anne has been informed that her temporary residence visa is ready and can be added to her passport.  We don't regret coming here before the consulate let us know that the visa was ready because we already feel a lot more settled than we did two weeks ago.

Anne has an option to mail the passport into the Boston consulate and have them send it back to her, but she does have to be outside of Portugal for this process so that the new visa can be stamped at the border when she returns as a temporary resident.  The logistics of this are unfolding but will have Anne visiting our daughters in England for a few days.  Flights at short notice to the USA are incredibly expensive right now so the choice was $90 to England vs $1440 each way to the USA.

Cafe and playground in Silves

 

So I'll be spending the first weekend alone in the new house.  Since 2020 and the COVID lockdowns Anne and I have been more or less joined at the hip, so it will be weird to be apart for a few days.  There are plenty of projects here that I'll be able to work on in the meantime.

Anne has insisted that none of them include climbing a ladder - we have to still figure out the emergency response situation.

Empty House

The trip from the airport to our new house involved a few stops that we couldn't avoid. We had to stop to sort out getting a Portuguese mobile phone plan and look into the internet, on our way to an appointment with the lawyer who handled the sale, to get the keys of the house. After that a quick trip to my cousin's house to pick up a bag that we left there after our last visit and then we had stop to buy a few necessities.

We have been using a small handle-shaped scale to make sure that our suitcases weren't over the aircraft limit. Anne did a great job in the last hour before we left organizing and balancing all the luggage weight. I had a duffel bag with all my clothing and a second suitcase with all of our important documentation plus whatever miscellaneous other items Anne chose to include. I also had a carry-on bag well over the aircraft limit with all my camera gear and my computer and iPad.

Anne had paid for one extra suitcase so that she could bring all of her "things of importance" (art studio in a box, creative writing, etc.) and a bunch of other things she described as "things to make it a home" including a small ceramic face that Jessica made at her preschool in Grahamstown when she was four. It has a big lopsided grin and a blob of a nose and had been hanging outside the door of all of our previous houses. This thing weighs a pound or two and looks to me like a face of one of the totems that scare off evil spirits.

One of the suitcases had sheets and a duvet for the bed that we had arranged to be left behind for us and also a few table cloths.

I was, of course, anxious about a few things. We knew what we had not been told about our previous home when we bought it and we have friends with horror stories about omissions in the details of the house that cost them a bomb to fix. I was waiting to see what we would uncover when we arrived here.

I was also worried about the airline wanting to check the bag with my really heavy camera gear and computer.

Amazingly the check-in at the air port was really smooth. I apologized for the 5 large suitcases and the person doing the check-in said "this is nothing!" I think because all of them were exactly at the maximum allowed she didn't think to check anything other than the dimensions of my bag - which she did by asking me to turn around to show it to her.

The luggage was checked all the way through to our final destination even though we had a 5 hour layover in Lisbon which meant that we wouldn't have trouble lugging it over long distances through both airports.

So the flights went off without a hitch. We were of course, exhausted. Neither of us were able to sleep on the 6 hour flight to Lisbon or in the airport.

Lunch on our way from the airport.  Albufeira shopping center

 

We landed at 5:20am in Lisbon after leaving at 6pm the previous night (+5 hour time difference) and finished the little shopping we had to do at about 5:30pm, arriving at the new house just around sunset at 6:18pm

We were absolutely exhausted.

The house is walled in by a high fence and a pair of gates with hydraulic arms. They opened beautifully as we pulled up and we edged in with Anne excitedly going to the front door to let me in while I stood at the gate pressing buttons to get them to close. They budged and locked up and budged again but would not close.

Walled garden and a flapping shade cloth on the list to fix

I gave up and we made our triumphal entrance into the empty echoing house - it has a few essential pieces of furniture - a couch, a large bed, a table with chairs and a small desk with a desk chair.

We did the tour, stopping in each room to turn on the heat (they installed a wall mounted unit that does both air conditioning and heat). The house was cold. We unpacked a few things and had late supper and made the bed but the water was ice-cold.

I went into the "engine room" where the photovoltaic heated water is circulated into a tank. The tank temperature showed 10°C and the pump that was supposed to circulate the water was making a weird buzzing noise.

The previous owner did not leave detailed instructions as promised, rather a quick video walk through that said something along the lines of "these dials should both be at 3 so make sure there is enough water in the system by using these two levers". I assumed that one of the levers reduced the pressure and the other increased it but when I tried them the pressure went to 3 and once I turned it off it slowly went back down to 0.

Resigning myself to fate I said to Anne lets go to bed and we can look at this again tomorrow, knowing that in addition to the poor instructions, the previous owner had also not left behind any contact information for someone that we could call to help with a service. How many days ahead with no warm water?

We went to bed at about 10 which took the number of hours since sleep up to about 42 and I woke with my alarm at 6:30am (1:30am EDT) got up dutifully and went back down to the engine room to see if I could trace the pipes to get a better idea of where the water went from those two levers.

I turned one of them back on and as the setting went back down to zero I heard the sound of water outside. It was an overflow pipe - which, ok, means that you don't need to release pressure as it handles that itself (maybe?).

I then decided that I'd light the stove that is supposed to supplement the photovoltaic cells in the winter.

AGA-type stove to supplement solar heating

Of course the previous owner had not left a helpful amount of wood for us but I found some scraps under a wheel barrow and within an hour there was a fire going and the dial on the insulated hot water tank started to rise.

He had said in his video that 30°C was enough for a shower but for the underfloor heating it really needs to be at least 40°C and so we kept feeding the fire after finding an expensive home improvement store that sells them by the bag. It looks like on the third night we'll be able to have a warm shower.

In the meantime the gates have been bothering me and when Anne drove off today to find out what had happened to the man who was supposed to get our internet connected, the bloody gates started closing all the way and then opening all the way over and over - as if they were waving her goodbye!

We also discovered that our basin leaks if you fill it up for what Anne calls a "Cowboy splash" and what I was taught in the army was some other unmentionable cleaning ritual. Luckily it doesn't leak if you just run water.

There are plenty of things that we know need attention but we decided after the first couple of days to take the long view on this and pick off each problem as we can.

Once we have internet I'll be able to research calibrating the gate hydraulics. The hydraulic arms look too strong for the wall and the gate and show signs that they have been hammering the concrete wall posts because they try to open or close beyond where they can.

On the plus side we have pleasant neighbors who took me to a local hairdresser in the next village. Her husband delivers wood by the ton (which is about half a cord - an American unit of measure for wood) so we should have enough wood to see us through the last month of winter.

The first week here was eventful. I found myself walking around a local supermarket wondering what we've got ourselves into before catching myself and pointing out that we have got ourselves into an adventure (which cheered me up no end).

Moving is hard

The deed for our new home was signed in our absence on Dec 8.  We had the realtor do a walk-through and record a video of the condition of the house and the yard to make sure that it was not left with a lot of junk that we would have to take care of.  

This was a lesson learned from our previous house - it is amazing how easily things can slip through if you don't make it a condition of the closing on the sale.  We were so naive when we bought our house in Essex and the realtor so useless, that we ended up with piles of bathroom tiles and bags of rock hard grout (expired) that we had to lug down from the attic and then figure out how to dispose of.

After getting the video walk-through we sent a message to our attorney to sign on our behalf and we got confirmation that the deed was signed.

Back in Massachusetts we had a few house-sits lined up.  We have a really good record with our house-sits - I suspect as with anything you get a mixed bag of people looking after your house when it is a free service in exchange for pet sitting, so it is rewarding to get a good rating and positive reviews.

We looked after houses in Salem (the witch city), Falmouth (Cape Cod), Swampscott, Gloucester, and Westborough (about 40miles west of Boston) each of which had animals with unique characters and quirks.  If you pause to think about pet-sitting, the profile of a household that would prefer well reviewed and vetted strangers over other options is one where the animals probably do have some quirks.

One of the households had a pair of large dogs and we were told they would be fine if we didn't allow them on the bed but they usually slept with them.  It became pretty clear on the first night that there was no way that the dogs could be put out of the room (scratching on the door) or forced to lie on a bed on the floor and so we each had a heavy dog more or less draped over us all night long.  

Sea view in Falmouth

We figured out that we could have one of them sleep on another bed in a second room with Matthew, but the one who insisted on sleeping with us ended up draped over three quarters of the bed with us scrunched up on the edge with Anne desperately trying to avoid plummeting off the bed onto the floor!

Dogs after a snowstorm

At two of the homes we asked the owners if they minded us having guests to visit - in one case a dinner party and in two other cases one or both Matt and Nick stayed with us.  We were able to celebrate Thanksgiving with both sons, Nick flying up from Mexico and Matt visiting from New Haven.  This is a very generous act in my opinion - the owners happy to trust us and our boys in their house.

Sometimes you don't get to meet or socialize with the pet owners - at one house we discovered that there were other pet-sitters booked to follow immediately after us.  When the owners returned, they contacted us to ask about some damage to the comforter (duvet) on the bed that we had slept in.  Apparently it looked like it had been used outside on the ground and was dirty and torn.  It was a pretty awkward exchange with them.  The owners were in somewhat of a bind in this situation - clearly the people who came after us would have complained about the condition of the bed if we had left it in that state for them so I guess the fact that it wasn't mentioned before they returned validated us.

We met some amazing new people during this trip to New England.  In 3 of the houses we met the owners before they left, having a meal with them and hearing their stories.

There was a family where the mother had taken the 3 sons to Spain for 3 months - walking the Camino Santiago for part of it and writing journals about their experiences.  The children are all at university now but their trip was still a vivid memory for them 3 years later.  

Then a couple with a beautiful large dog who are involved in projects that have been influential in shaping legislation for the climate in the USA who offered to have us stay with them if we ran out of places to stay (when they learned that we are moving from one house-sit to another).

And finally a woman with a really timid little cat who encouraged us to swing from the rafters if we wanted to while she went on a fantastic adventure vacation where she mushed a team of dogs for 7 days.  In her case, she is still friends with a couple in England who were her first house-sitters 10 years ago!  We are sure that we will hear from her again having invited her to keep in touch for when she visits Europe again sometime.

We also spent time visiting with friends.  One of our friends stepped in to do some last minute coordinating to help us get a few things that couldn't fit into our shipment to Portugal sent off as donations.  In America you can't give away used furniture - most frequently you have to pay people to take them away.

We were also invited (again) to stay at the homes of friends we have known since we came to New England in 2001.  We are of course aware always that we are in their space and no matter how much they love us there is a limit to how long before they start to feel less comfortable with us being there. 

My grandmother once told me that friends and family visiting are like fish - they go off after 3 days!  We stretched that to a couple of stays of a week at a time and it was always at their objection that we moved on somewhere.  But these are delicate alliances, you know that you are loved and welcome but you also know that you are just a little bit in the way.

That said.  We are really tired of moving every week or two into some new accommodation where we have to adjust to a new set (or lack) of cooking utensils and appliances.  Anne calculated that we have stayed at 41 places all told counting some repeat stops at friends' houses in the last 16 months.

We yearn to start building our new home - the house sitting empty, waiting for us to get there with the front yard calling for us to build a garden.

Our empty house

The current step in the process is that we are waiting for Anne's temporary residence visa which will be issued by the consulate in Boston.  She visited them last week with a few questions - in particular whether there is any way of knowing how long it might be before they will issue it.  They assured her that it had been approved by them but was now at the government department in Portugal that adjudicates residence applications.  Unfortunately they have been stalled for now because of a massive backlog and because of changes that were made last year in their department and so there is no telling how long it might be.  It may be weeks but could also be months.

So we have decided to return to Portugal on our tourist visas so that we can start getting our house in order.  The shipping company collected our worldly goods a couple of weeks ago and they are waiting to put them onto a ship for us.  We expect them to take 3 months to get them to us.

Why on earth are we doing this to ourselves again?

Moving to the USA was tough.  We had few resources and knew only one family, who were friends from South Africa, and a very generous friend I had reconnected with who I met in my first year at university.  He lived in Baltimore and offered to sell me his car for very little.  I remember driving back from Baltimore to Massachusetts along the New Jersey Turnpike in a vicious winter storm belting out the Simon and Garfunkel song "America" because of the reference to the highway.

We also basically took our "family home" away from our children.

Even though the culture felt pretty familiar - we'd watched enough American TV and movies to recognize the run of the mill, we had no idea how to navigate health care and the bureaucracy of the Registry of Motor Vehicles, Social Security admin and, of course the whole visa thing.

A big advantage was the language - we could at least understand and be understood.  We came to realize that in some cases our accents sounded like we thought we were "better-than-you" and ended up being treated differently in some places while in other places we got credited for being smarter than we might have with a different accent.

So here we are - having sold the "family home" again - heading to a place with a reputation for a tough bureaucracy and a massive language barrier and a culture where we will continue to be aliens - although from what we've seen they are a lot more accepting of foreigners.

Shaolin Liu theater in Rockport - a favorite theater

We are totally down for this, but we know that we are giving up a lot - connections we have made over 20 years here.

We do have valued friends in South Africa who still keep in touch with us, but we discovered that it is hard for most people to maintain friendships over this distance.  We are out of sight and our struggles are not the same as theirs any more.  

I suspect the same might be true with friends that we have made in the USA, we might lose that connection with them as well.  A move like this comes with the cost of losing big chunks of a community.

View over Rockport near our last AirBnb in the USA

But we are going to be embarking on a late-life study of a new language, which is exciting.  After learning Spanish for a few years, Portuguese is proving quite difficult but once we are immersed, we expect it will be another way of keeping our minds sharp and learning new things about a different culture.

So all in all, as big a change as it will be, we decided not to let it intimidate us, but rather see it as another new adventure.