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!