Not quite a year and a half ago, I was summoned back to my parents’ home because of my mother suffering a health issue that could have turned catastrophic. It…

A careful reading of this humble blog might reveal some surprising, if not actually embarrassing, patterns in our travels. To wit: we’ve been visiting destinations in — let’s call it…

This post is part of a series called Aveiro – Summer 2024 Our jaunt to Aveiro was a quickie this time; just a couple of days respite from the heat….

This post is part of a series called Moving to Portugal (attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupery) (the photo is not relevant. Nothing interesting to look at it in this post,…

This post is part of a series called Moving to Portugal We’ve decided that we would like to move to Portugal. Great! Now how exactly do we make it happen…

This post is part of a series called Moving to Portugal The Portugal portion of our story is, unsurprisingly if you’ve actually read parts 1-4, complicated. When we started to…

This post is part of a series called Moving to Portugal As I said at the end of the previous post in this series, we started to get cold feet…

This post is part of a series called Moving to Portugal Welcome to the second part of our annotated look back at the process of us moving to Europe. Hopefully,…

Lisa and I had formulated a retirement plan over the first umpteen years of our relationship; a good, solid, dependable, American retirement plan. We would work into our 60s, then move to Ashland, Oregon or one of the neighboring towns. There, we would integrate with the artistic and spiritual communities, volunteer at the Shakespeare Festival, and generally enjoy our life. We even had our eye on a retirement community a little north on I-5 that we always saw when we drove down, and figured that was where we would transition to if we weren’t able to live on our own at some point. It was a fine plan.

It comes a lot, not just with the immigrants here but with travel in general. There’s these levels of language learning (woof, used up all the “l”s in my keyboard…