I imagine the Serviço de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras — or SEF for short– the government unit responsible for processing and approving visas — as a typical office. Typical people sit…

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 last post in this series, we started to get cold feet…

This post is part of a series called The Portugal D7 Visa Process Our first few posts here at The Ramble have been recounting the story of how Lisa and…

This post is part of a series called Moving to Portugal Moving to Europe was still very much a hypothetical at this point, but a couple of things began to…

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.

This post is part of a series called Moving to Portugal We’ve got some big changes coming. At the end of November we’re going to San Francisco to share Thanksgiving…