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!

Stalking

The few weeks that I have been in the USA alone have been a little tough despite the warm welcome of friends here.

Before I left Portugal, Anne suggested that we get a couple of cameras, partly for animal activity and partly as extra security.  In the USA we had been using a platform that has a base station that the cameras connect to and a monthly subscription.  I was not too keen to use something with a monthly recurring fee so I settled on a camera company that has SD cards and a mobile phone app with an optional monthly subscription if you feel you need to store information for later retrieval online.

So it was that my phone in the USA kept on pinging me when there was movement in the front or back of our house and I would regularly open the phone app and see Anne or Nick hanging out on the front porch. Once or twice I said something to them through the camera but more often, I'd send them a WhatsApp message to tell them that I was snooping.

In my last post I was so focused on talking about being hosted by people we'd met and befriended in America that I forgot to mention some old friends!

In 1999 we had decided that I'd look for work outside of South Africa and we had a couple of friends who had gone to America to work in the booming information technology industry during the dot com bubble.  One family who we'd known for years in Grahamstown and who's children and ours built an elaborate fantasy that they were cousins, had moved to America and offered to host me at their house for an exploratory trip.

In 2000 I planned to go first to England and then to America on a scouting trip.  Our friend in England was away for a conference once the dates were finalized so I switched the plan to start in America.  Before I left home I used a facility on one of our servers to send an email set to arrive while I was in the air.  At the time this was a trick that was not known outside of tech circles so was utterly unexpected.   The email said goodbye, and made some promises about a different future.  I discovered with some horror that this email coming over the ether from me freaked her out.  Suddenly the sweet message played out as somewhat sinister message saying goodbye to the living and reassuring her that despite this, her future would be different now.

My hosts in America treated me to tours, road trips and a ride up to meet a climber who knew a mutual friend of theirs.  It was on one of these climbing outings that I learned about a company that was looking for someone fitting my background.  It was also not the first time that "Rhodes University" in my resume was interpreted as "he was a Rhodes Scholar".  Technically I suppose I am a scholar from Rhodes, but I only learned quite a lot later that this false conclusion had helped to cement my credentials at the time.  

Anne had a similar experience with an item in her resume that listed her as having taught in East London.  It was on the morning of the day that she was introduced to the school that she realized, as the headmaster proudly announced that she had taught in East London, that he had assumed it was London, England!

We have had a standing tradition of a Boxing Day (the day after Christmas) lunch with these South African friends since we came over to America so our more recent visits have been a little sad given the distance to travel for a meal like that.  They also have the distinction of being friends that we have jokingly alternately blamed and then thanked for encouraging us to come to America in the first place.

I was able to take a trip down to Raleigh to visit a couple we grew close to over the first ten years in Boston.  I had worked with the husband at my first job.  He and his wife adopted a daughter who become our adopted niece.  She was a the subject of many of my attempts at child portraits before they moved down to Raleigh and is in her early teens now.  I was honored that she agreed to allow me to take a photograph of her while I was there.  Anne will no doubt use one of them as a reference for a new drawing of her.  I really enjoyed hanging out with them and experiencing the warmth of their company.

Their daughter has inherited her dad's sense of humor.  I told her the story of the fairy house and asked her if she thought the fairies would find the house that our granddaughter built for them and move in?  She said:

"Yes, they'll find it.  And they'll get you!"

After I officially retired at the end of April I have been going through these bittersweet steps to transition from full time work.  I have made myself available for some consulting to smooth the process of my exit so I expect to have increasing time at my disposal in the coming weeks to get started on the few projects that are lined up.

Last all-hands send off

I told a colleague that my daily routine would probably involve carting some wheelbarrow loads of stone from the yard, fiddling with technology to get our gates working again, setting up graphs to show the temperature trends in our hot water system and reading.  When I told Anne what I had said, she reminded me that I have a lot to catch up on in the cooking department so I guess there is that too.

My last stop was at Yale where Matt graduated on Monday.  He has a Masters in Nursing Science which makes him a registered nurse and a nurse practitioner, a career in the USA (and perhaps elsewhere) which allows him to consult with patients and prescribe medicine.  It is a role that is somewhere between a nurse and a doctor.  He specialized in Family Medicine (General Practice) and he will start a residency in Seattle in the fall at an outpatient community clinic.

The Yale campus is truly beautiful and I was proud to be able to go there and be with him for his graduation.

My flight back to our new home leaves in a few minutes and I won't be putting an email up to be triggered while I am flying over the Atlantic, though mostly because in all likelihood I'll have wifi and be able to message from my seat way up in the air.

I have one more month on my tourist visa to the EU after which I have to leave.  I'll have fingers crossed and be holding thumbs that my visa approval for the residence permit is approved in time for me to return to the USA, pick it up and head back home at the end of the first week of July.

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.

Portugal: Choices and consequences

We went for another visit to each of the houses that we had chosen.  Even before we walked into the condo and were handed the condo rule book in Portuguese, we had decided to opt for autonomy over convenience.

So, almost exactly a year after we drove down our steep driveway in Essex for the last time, we decided to put an offer in on the Energy House.

I suppose two things really influenced our approach to the offer.  The first was remembering how painful some of the unforeseen complications in the previous house were and the second was that we had a backup plan to come back again next year to continue looking if necessary.  

We lived in our previous house (a duplex) without complication for more or less the first 6 years - and then for the next 11 years had to deal with condominium management issues (neighbors not paying) and a neighbor who bought land behind us and delighted in using his access to the right of way in front of our house to engage in a pissing contest with us every winter.

The bottom section of our driveway was shared with two neighbors, one really nice couple who really needed it to access a portion of their land (but never used it) and the other (behind us) who didn't need it (a driveway had been built directly to his property before he bought his land) but he insisted on exercising his right to use it because the right to use it existed.

The consequence was that every now and again in the summer he'd drive some farm equipment over it and in the winter when snow storms hit and we struggled for hours to clear the driveway and occasionally to help our neighbors who would get stuck, he would pull up and start complaining or yelling about his right of way being blocked.

At one point we had someone living next door with other tenants who was single,  in her late 50s and who worked as a carer for some elderly people in a nearby town.  She would come home after her shift and occasionally (say a couple of times each winter) get stuck somewhere on the driveway.

Of course it was annoying - she didn't have winter tires, didn't drive up the driveway boldly enough and didn't plan her comings and goings very well but I would go out and try to help if she got stuck.  

Our neighbor behind, in contrast, would come by at some point and start yelling about her blocking his right of way, completely ignoring the irony of being able to drive around to the front of the house from his house, without even using the right of way that she was blocking!

He made the outrageous suggestion that she should park at the city hall if it snowed enough to prevent her from getting up the driveway - a walk of a good 20 minutes, late at night, in sub-zero temperatures.

The people living in the 2nd unit of the condominium became increasingly difficult to deal with as well.   Over the 11 years it changed hands 4 times, each time getting worse.  Towards the end with the last two owners we had a boarding house operating from the unit with very little that we could remedy.  I described in an earlier entry what we discovered about the last sale of that second unit and how the previous owner had scammed them into thinking they were buying both our and their properties.

So our new house would not have a shared right of way, nor would it be in a condominium.

We'll set aside for the moment the possibility that we'll still have crappy neighbors.   At least they won't have leverage over parts of our property to make our lives miserable.

So, given that we felt this way, and, more importantly, that we were prepared to walk away from the house and come back in 3 months and begin the process all over again, we put in an offer that was considerably lower than the listed price.  We had heard that the house had been on the market for about 7 months before we looked at it and so our offer was accepted by the seller with a little bit of haggling.   There are plenty of houses on the market in southern Portugal that are changing hands rapidly for large amounts of money but they are mostly along the coast so a little inland gives you a chance of a better deal.

While we waited for the process following our accepted offer to unfold we had a house-sit near the town of Santarem - close to where a friend from Kimberley lives with her husband.  

Two heroes and a pigeon, Santarem - photo Anne

 

We stayed in a large house with beautiful tiled floors looking after two English Setters - the "gun dogs" used for hunting, except one of them was freaked out by the little insect zapper we occasionally used on the mosquitoes that managed to evade their mosquito screens and the other was freaked out by the sound of gunshots from hunting that happens in the area twice a week (hunters with dogs who walk the land looking for birds to flush out).

We underestimated their skittishness when we watched the quarter final between France and South Africa on the Sunday night where our clapping and shouting sent them both out into the yard.  

I found them much later in two separate corners wagging feebly, their eyes shining pitifully in the beam of my flashlight.  

Being outside was probably the best therapy for them because once we coaxed them to come back inside with us they were as happy as clams to sleep on their beds in our bedroom again.

During our trip to Santerem a survey of the Energy house was completed by an engineer who found a few minor things that we will need to correct if the sale goes through.  We are now in the process of legal diligence where a lawyer checks that the property does not have any debt associated with it and all the plans are in place to justify the structure.

There is a risk that things won't conclude but it is diminishing as we move through each phase of the process.  We have returned to Lagos and have signed papers to give our lawyer power of attorney to conclude the sale for us if things drag out beyond when we return to the USA in a few weeks.

In the meantime, we are finding other obstacles to do with getting residence permits.  It is inevitably more difficult than you imagine and there is a constant stream of conditions that we hadn't thought of but are gradually wading through.

For example, it appears that you might have to show proof of steady income in your retirement.  This is not difficult for people coming from a country or company where there are pensions that start paying out when you retire, but the USA reinvented all of that in 1978 when they introduced a law that allowed for 401k plans. Basically a 401k is an investment account into which the employer can put pretax retirement funds for the employee and the employee can decide how to invest these funds.  Often the money is deducted from the employee's salary pre-tax and occasionally the employer matches a small percentage as an incentive to contribute.

In addition to not having pensions, there is a very strong incentive to delay drawing Social Security, the government pension also funded from your monthly salary.  The biggest monthly payout comes when you are 70 (you can draw earlier but the monthly payments are almost double at 70 than they are if you start at say, 63).

So this presents a perfect storm if you have to show proof of regular income for a retiree.   There is a chance that the person reviewing your application will consider savings accounts and investment accounts as unreliable proof because "who knows, you could gamble it all away, or buy a boat!"  We are working to eliminate this risk in the process.

We have one more trip which will be up to Nazaré next week where at around this time of year they have freak 100ft waves that crazy people try to surf.

Wait, is this a metaphor for what we are doing?  

Maybe.