There are a number of things we do and carry with us when we travel to give us a sense of continuity, of familiarity, in what can often be strange. Travel is fun and exciting but even great experiences are stressful and (eventually) exhausting. If you only take a trip or two a year, this may be less obvious; we realistically are going somewhere (near or far) almost monthly.

Before we left the US, we picked up a couple of portable valet trays. They are reinforced fabric squares with snaps in each corner to convert them from flat to tray. When we’re home, one sits next to John’s side of the bed and the other out in our entryway. While traveling, we bring one and set it up in a central spot in our room. Home or away, it’s the spot for keys, change, and any small items that make their way into pockets for short periods of time.

We also have a couple of containers we use to corral the items we need over and over again. You know, charging cords, plug adapters, cables to play movies on the hotel TV from our laptops, our portable speaker . . . things like that. For us, this is a zippered folder to corral cords and adapters, a hard-sided case for slightly more delicate electronics, and a largish, zippered pouch for power cords. Using the same organizers with each trip saves us time and the frustration of “where did I put . . .?” They tuck easily into out backpacks or suitcases and take up very little space. Since we started using them, we don’t waste time rooting around in suitcase pockets looking for any of these things.

Did you wonder about the portable speaker? If we stay in a place for a long time, we love listening to music in the evening. More vitally, we play white noise to help us sleep. It’s not perfect, but serves to mask a lot of road noise, interruptions from neighbors, or even that bar down the street. Lisa actually bought one originally (we’re on our second one) for John just to use in the shower per his request; as we started to travel more, we realized that it was the perfectly sized solution.

Finally, we picked up a habit from a long-ago hotel housekeeper: we use one of the washcloths to anchor bathroom geegaws and use one of the room’s glasses to hold our toothbrushes and paste. (Lisa has no idea why toothbrush holders aren’t standard in hotel rooms.) All the things you use daily are laid out, tidily, and protected from any weird microbes on the counter itself. No need to keep everything in your toiletry organizer or cosmetics bag. (The hotel we’re staying at doesn’t offer mugs [Lisa’s preferred holder] and the glasses — seen in the back of the image — are very short. We improvised with the paper cups offered and they turned out to be quite stable.)

It doesn’t take much to make the continually new places feel a little more like home. When we take that time, we can offer ourselves a greater sense of ease and calm in the places we often spend a lot of time when we travel.

Since we’re always refining these ideas, we are well aware that we haven’t got “the perfect” answers. SOoooo… what are some of yours?

One of our long-term plans for being in Europe is to create opportunities for long stays in places. (As an example, a bucket list item for John is to live in London for a year so he can see everything playing at the theaters.)

We’re not made of money, as the saying goes, so we’ve always known we’d need to be creative about how we made long-stay travel possible. Back in the day, pre-Portugal, our plans had to factor in long travels days as well as lodging costs. Now, it’s basically the high cost of lodging. Sheer practicality: even a cheap accommodation of $75/ day adds up if you stay there for a month. Back when we were working we could occasionally splurge, knowing we would make that back over time. Now we are on a fixed income and it feels scary to dip into our pool of moolah for such a large amount.

As a side note: our residency also carries a restriction about how much time we spend outside of Portugal. For the first two years its capped at eight months; then its eight months again, but it’s over a three year period. Permanent Residents, which can be requested after five years, are allowed to be out of country as much as six months each year.

As a side-side note: All of this is subject to the Schengen 90-day rule which states that you can stay no more than 90 days in any 180-day period within the 27 countries of the Schengen area. As a practicality, this means that can’t travel in the EU for more than three months, even if you are crossing borders during that time and not staying in one country.

The Schengen Area (SA) is made up of these countries: Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland.

There are four EU countries that are NOT in the Schengen area: Ireland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Cyprus, although the last three are in the process of becoming members.

Sneak-minded readers may have figured out the “loop hole” of the Schengen Rule, which is that one can stay 89 days in the Schengen area and then travel to another country for at least 90 more days before resuming their stay within the SA for up to 90 more days. For example, you might spend 90 days in Italy, then step across the border to spend the next 90 days in Switzerland, before moving along to France. This is known as “doing the Schengen Hop”.

Side-side-side note: Future readers: as of 2024, visitors from 60 countries (including the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and all EU member states) will need to apply for an online ETIAS, which is essentially a visa waiver, when entering the SA. The waiver will be valid for 90 days within a 180-day period.)

[Yes, this is a very long side note.]

So, unless we become permanent residents or EU citizens, we’ll always be conscious of the time spent out of country and within a Schengen area. Nonetheless, long stays are eminently possible, as long as we have the budget to support paying rent while not living in Braga (we’re ignoring the daily costs of food and such because that’ll be similar n matter where we sleep).

[Thanks for hanging in so far, btw.]

All of which is to announce (really, can this lede be buried any further?) that we’ll be adding a Page to this site for our new availability as house- and pet- sitters!

All props to our (fantastic) house sitter, Barbara Farfan. She first sat for us during our honeymoon in 2012, and returned again in 2017, and 2019. She was (and is) a full time ‘sitter who creates income with writing gigs and inspired us to contemplate using house sitting as a way to get to travel the world in our retirement. We figure that we’ve got some value-add as experienced pet owners who have had animals with behavior issues, as well as elderly/special needs critters who got all sorts of medications over the years.

We found her (and the others who covered other travel events) through an online clearinghouse (housecarers.com) where we’d found the people who sat for us in previous world travels. Since those early days, a number of sites have sprung up and are doing a roaring business. What we noticed was that the successful sitters had references.

Obviously we didn’t have references as sitters, so we’ve being doing sits for friends. As it turns out, our community of immigrants here in Braga is a den (heh) of animal lovers, so there’s been no shortage of friendly acquaintances who could use the help. Plus, bonus, we get to have pets for a few days without the actual commitment of having pets. Win win win… win? Four wins, I think? Maybe three. Anyway. It’s been a lot of fun to hang out with kitties and pooches again, with the added bonus of helping out people we genuinely like. And our friends appreciate that we aren’t charging for services rendered; not that we would charge friends even if it was just for kicks, but the fact that we’re just looking to build our resume makes it an easy sell.

The various pet-sitter clearinghouses online have actually become pretty competitive, especially if the ‘sit is in a popular destination. When we finally decide to start doing this for real we’ll have a few things (hopefully) going in our favor. First, we’ll have built up a good portfolio of references. Second, living over here and being retired, we can prioritize people who emergency/last-minute requests with little hassle. And third, we’re not too picky about exactly where we go so long as it’s interesting. We were just noodling on a ‘sit on the west coast of Scotland, in a little village. Nothing world-class sexy about it, but hey, it’s Scotland; plus, since it was “just” a cat-sit there’d be some travel flex and rail travel is dead easy over there. It may be a little hamlet that nobody has heard of outside of Scotland, but who cares? It looked pretty and it was logistically sensible. Anyhow, we didn’t try for it but it’s definitely the kind of thing we’ll be looking for in the future. Stay tuned!

It was an “I got a phone call at 4 AM” caliber scare, and as I have said to people about this, my sister knows how to do math; she knew exactly what time it was when she called me from back in the States. You also know how serious it was from how quickly I committed to going to South Carolina. If you’ve had a chance to get to know us Ramblers (a thing I’ve never called us before and, having now “heard” it, will never do again) you know that we talk. A lot. Lisa’s father (hi, Terry!) once remarked on how much we communicate, with an undertone of “I’m proud of what good communicators you are”. Lisa and I laughed in unison and explained that in fact we are terrible at communicating with one another but have learned to compensate for this by going over things. A lot. In detail. We’re so used to it that we forget that other people don’t necessarily do it that way. ANYWAY (holy shit, you talk a lot, John? Shocking…), I did not discuss it with my now kind-of awake bride before saying “yeah, ok, I’m coming as soon as I can.” And she, when she heard the details, completely agreed.

To keep this from being an episode of “Marcus Welby, MD” (kids, ask your grandparents) let me just get you the diagnosis up front. She has congestive heart failure, which is not a sudden thing but it apparently tipped over into the red that week or so. She had actually gone into the hospital once, stayed for a few days, and then was released with what was, in hindsight at least, unseemly haste. She went home with oxygen tanks, a machine for refilling said tanks, and oh yes a similarly aged husband who was likely to trip over all of these new tubes and cables on his way to the bathroom, unplugging some or all of it. It took about three days for her to be back in bad shape, and so into the Intensive Care Unit she went. That’s when I got the call. It was a bit of a blur after that, but I’m pretty sure there was pneumonia in there at some point. At the worst of it, she was getting oxygen “from the wall”, which is to say the industrial feed rather than just one of those canisters you see people with, and it was on full blow.

Also not trying to write a mystery/suspense novel so here’s how the story ends; no need for you to have any anxiety waiting to hear how it turns out. Mom is apparently on the extreme end of the “positive outcomes” side of the results bell curve. She is basically… well, fine. I mean, she’ll probably be on oxygen for the rest of her life, but now it’s just a steady trickle out of one of those canisters that you roll around with. No, you’d rather not need that sort of thing, but given the other options we’ll take it. She walks, she talks, she’s just as coherent as ever (and she’s always been a pretty sharp cookie), she beats me at cribbage. Dangit. So, no, this is not a story that ends in drama.

One new thing that happened on this trip is that I bought a one-way ticket to South Carolina. I’ve never gone on a trip and not known when I was coming home, but the simple truth is there was no fixed agenda for the coming days. Total travel time was about 20 hours, and then my brother and his girlfriend(? do we have girlfriends when we’re almost 60?) picked me up at CAE aka, Columbia International Airport. In the end, I was in South Carolina for around 4 weeks; plus or minus. Also of note, this is the longest stretch of time that Lisa and I have been apart from one another since we first hitched our horses back in 2003-ish. We’ve both had therapy and we’re pretty sure we aren’t “actually” codependent, but we sure do like spending time together.

So why didn’t Lisa come? Funny story! We committed ourselves awhile back to house sitting for friends of ours while they were out of the country. They have a lovely home in Arcozelo Villa Verde (usually just referred to as Villa Verde although there’s a teeny distinction involved), a nice piece of property with a little grass, trees, the whole shebang. They’ve also got a dog and a cat, which is the reason they wanted housesitters rather than just someone to look in on the place. Lisa and I have designs on doing a lot of these kinds of gigs in the future (more on that another time) so we were happy to start off with something close to home. The pets were a lot of fun; Jack is a black dog with some white markings, maybe 10-15 pounds lighter than Sasha was but the same general size and shape, so it was easy to fit him into life. Kitty is a sweet indoor-outdoor cat who has no use for boys as far as we could tell; that was Lisa’s cat, full stop! We were scheduled to be there for almost three weeks; I got the call about four days into our stay. The people we were ‘sitting for weren’t even on the same continent at the time, and in case they had made significant commitments based on us having their home covered; one of us, at least, had to stay. Lisa, who let’s remind everyone is one of life’s great people and my dearest love, never once made a noise about how very different the house stay would be without me there, but it was. First of all, we still don’t have a car, and being out by yourself in the countryside, no matter how peaceful and crime-free the country is, can still be nervous-making if you aren’t used to it. Jack was a huge comfort there. Also, while this isn’t a hard and fast rule, the usual split of responsibilities for something like this would have me in charge of making sure that Jack got plenty of exercise; now she had to handle that as well. She took all of this in stride, but it did mean that she wasn’t coming with me. By the time our obligations were fulfilled with the housesitting gig my mom was clearly on the mend and it didn’t really make sense to expend the resources to get her out to the States as well; especially since, in just a few months, we’ll be coming back for a planned trip.

So, this isn’t meant to be a complete blow-by-blow. My mom is basically fine, Lisa ended up handling the housesit quite well without me, and before too long I was able to come back home.

I figure what’s worth talking about from a Rambly perspective is what the US looks like when you haven’t been there for awhile. Short version: reeeeeaaaally big. I kind of forgot how (almost) every home and business in America accounts for parking sufficient cars. There’s parking for cars everywhere! Where I live now, yes there are a few shopping centers with big parking areas, but it’s just not anywhere near the same thing. Put it this way, if I’m driving in many parts of Portugal and I miss my turn, the idea of “turning around in the next parking lot” is a fool’s errand. You hear a lot about how cheap wine is in Portugal. That means I had the opposite reaction when I was rolling through a grocery store, not even looking for wine, but went past that section and was shocked at the prices of the bottles. Yes, there are a couple of cheap bottle here and there, but more than half of the selection was $10+. I’d say the average bottle at the store here is… 4 euros? Plus or minus? Things are expensive in ways that I didn’t remember at all. On my first full night there, after visiting mom at the hospital I just wanted a little comfort food… or stress eating, call it what you will. Anyway, I order a small pepperoni pizza from Domino’s, adding in some kind of small bread nibble-y things ’cause… comfort food, right? Shut up. Anyway those two items, plus a delivery charge, and then a tip to the driver (because I presume a shit wage and no healthcare, perhaps unfairly but probably not), it came to 41 USD. Readers in America are looking at that right now and thinking “er, yeah? Sounds like they were having a special.” I promise you, readers in Portugal are doing cartoon a-OO-ga eyes right now.

Long story short (shut up), while I certainly didn’t feel like a total stranger or anything so severe, the visit really stressed just how much I have acclimated to life in Portugal. It all came together when I realized that I was referring to South Carolina as the place where my mom and dad live, rather than “home”. And when I finally made it back to my bride and my apartment, I absolutely felt like I had come home.

Doing everything in a different language is draining and honestly the hardest aspect of living outside the US. Every interaction can be an exercise in bewilderment. We’ve both gotten to a point where we can get through a lot of basic conversations UNDERSTANDING the local, but neither of us is very good with vocabulary. (John is much further along the learning spectrum than Lisa, while Lisa is better at inferring context, but we’re both still at the most basic level.) What really makes us sad is when a local talks to us, clearly in a friendly manner, and we just have no way of engaging. Its a lost opportunity to extend our boundaries and become more “of” the community rather than remaining just “in” the community.

Relatedly, getting things done at the bureaucratic level is wearying. Partly because of our lack of language skills, but also because they think of how to do things differently in so many ways. This includes healthcare. To get an appointment at our local hospital (where our private insurance covers us) we can theoretically send a note through their website. However, when we get no response after the auto-reply for weeks we are left to wonder whether its a language issue, a lack of staffing, or the internet ate the response. So then we have to do what everyone does: go to the hospital’s waiting room, get a ticket, and wait our turn so we can talk to a human. Not hard at all, of course, just not as simple as it had been for us in the States. And wearying. Until we get there, we have no idea how busy the room is, how many people are staffing, or how available appointment slots will be. Oh, and whether we’ll have a clerk who speaks English or if this will be conducted via translation software on our phones.

One of our plans for moving here was that we’d both develop new — healthier — habits based on getting MORE. More sleep. More veg & fruit. More exercise. And we do, but not enough. Turns out that we brought ourselves with us, and we’ve got years of being sedentary keeping us from achieving those objectives. Some days we don’t leave the apartment, despite having actual errands to run and things to do. Often, its having a date with someone that pries us out — and we are so grateful to everyone who Whatsapps us on a whim to invite for coffee or a meal. This staying in happens despite feeling safe in our neighborhood (and city) and genuinely being interested in what is around us in all directions. Moreover, our city has a lot of events going on all of the time. If we make it to the city center (a mere 15 minutes away) we are pretty much guaranteed to see something different.

In the end, and here’s what we’d label a “take-away” from this week’s post, moving to Portugal was all about having new opportunities and it has been precisely that. Next week we’ll be writing about our 10th Anniversary get away to a magical location, and next month we are making *two* trips that would have been inconceivable to us just 12 months ago. However, new opportunities aren’t the same thing as a magic wand. Some of you are thinking “well duh” right now, but as the kids say these days – “I don’t know who needs to hear this right now, but”: whatever work you’re doing on yourself doesn’t go away on a new continent, and it doesn’t necessarily even get easier. Different, sure, but whoever you are right now is who’ll you be in your dream home even if the dream is everything you’d hoped and more.

In our previous life, J. and I did laundry twice a week for a total of 4-5 loads. One day (usually Tuesday) we did the household laundry (sheets and towels), on the other day (usually Friday) we washed our clothes (darks, lights, and delicates). Once a month we washed dog bedding. A few times a year we washed the various throws and blankets.

We now do laundry almost daily.

Even though we have no pets, fewer clothing changes (not working reduces the need for different outfits daily), and haven’t been here long enough to need to wash bedding, we do a lot of laundry. We don’t even have “whites” so our loads don’t need to be segregated. And we wash everything on “delicate”!

We’re not alone, many of the immigrants we talk to report being surprised at how much attention laundry requires. In part this is because the washing machines are smaller so we need to do more loads. Another piece of the puzzle is that most of us dry our laundry on racks or lines rather than in a dryer. There’s only so much you can fit at a time. During the winter, we had to place the rack over a heater if we wanted the clothes to dry that day. (We took our towels and sheets to the lavandaria after washing them at home. It took too long otherwise.)

Doing this much laundry was not something I thought would be a part of my new life, but I must say I don’t mind. I look around at our neighbors and see that its a regular part of their life too. In a way it makes me more like a local, like I truly belong here. Watching them, I learned that you can old your sheets a couple of times before laying them on the rack and they will still dry over the course of the day. That all the small stuff (like socks) are safest if clothespins anchor them to the rack, otherwise a sudden gust of wind can send them over the edge into a neighbors balcony (or the street . . . Not that I know this from personal experience).

We’ve been using Tru Earth laundry strips instead of liquid or powder detergent and we highly recommend them! Our clothes are clean and we have nearly no waste. As a precaution we keep them safe from moisture in a ziploc bag, but that’s the only potential downside. Half of a strip (they come two to a sheet, so a quarter of a full sheet) works for a regular load, and we’d use a full strip if the items were particularly dirty. As a bonus, using less detergent has meant that our clothes don’t dry stiff.

Just sunshine and fresh air. When the summer comes we’ll make sure to dry our dark clothes inside out, or in the shade — the sunshine will bleach everything in short order. (I remember this from my childhood of drying everything on a line.)

It’s funny; I’m old enough to consider the idea of posting something from over the Atlantic some kind of fancy-pants miracle, but really now – it’s just wifi that they sell (for admittedly exorbitant rates) to anybody who wants it. I ain’t fnacy, I’ve just got nine bucks. But I digress. . . actually, I hadn’t really started saying anything, sooooo. . . I gress?

So. About halfway through our flight, over an ocean. Bags are packed and stowed. I’ve watched a movie (‘The Suicide Squad’, as in the newer one, which as far as I could tell had none of the violence cut based on the number of Gallagher’d heads but had every single swear word modified… bizarre. If you’ve seen the movie, think of Idris Elba and his daughter yelling “Forget You!” back and forth, over and over) and there’s still all the hours ahead. Lisa is at rest, trying to catch up on all the sleep that has been stolen from her by worry and crisis. Gods bless her, none of this happens without her. Truth be told, more than half the reason I even wanted to do this crazy thing is so she can set down so many other burdens, but just like Andy Dufresne she had one last (hopefully) sewer of… well, anyway. Hopefully this is the start of a long, long stretch of her being more at ease.

Nothing left to do up here but think, it seems. This wouldn’t really be worth posting to a blog if there wasn’t something to say to all you fine people. So with time to reflect, let’s nibble at the question we got asked the most, in numerous variants: why? Gods only know, we asked it more than any of you ever did.

Part of the answer has to be the traveling. Couples find their interests, some fast, some slower. Our dear friends Dan and Suz (despite being dear friends, honest!, I’ve never been 100% sure how to spell the shortened version of her name. Sorry, Shuzzue) have revealed themselves to be avid fans of F1 racing and going to live music. When I met Dan on his smoke breaks 20 years ago, I wouldn’t have guessed those as his future passions if you’d given me an hour and a dictionary. Point being, I don’t think either of us, had we been using dating profiles back then, would have listed “devote serious amounts of my life to traveling the world” in an “interests” section. And yet, together, we discovered we absolutely adore exploring the arts and culture of the past. Art, yes, but also (maybe more) the archaeological sites we’ve visited. We just can’t get enough of these things, or at least we haven’t yet. Time to up the dosage and see what happens.

There’s more to it, though. Any time we’ve been in Europe, we find ourselves drawn to the cultures we’ve experienced. As time went on we planned our trips around longer stays in fewer places, so we could feel at least a teeny bit like a resident. We spent a long-ish stretch in Venice several years back, and more than the Caravaggios we remember the piazzas, the families and friends gathering together in public squares with children running around, no agenda and no schedule. I certainly remember sitting (and driving, ahem) on the Campo in Sienna with far more accuracy than I do the things we saw in their esteemed cathedral. You can tell me that these same things happen in the U.S. Maybe we’re just unlucky, but we’ve traveled the U.S. a fair bit as well and we don’t have those same experiences to look back upon. By and large, European countries just value different things, and we always have found ourselves incredibly comfortable when we’ve had a chance to immerse ourselves.

Before anyone gets the wrong idea, almost none of our motivation is based on anti-U.S. sentiment. While not exactly chest-thumping patriots, neither are we socialist zealots that are taking the first opportunity to get the hell out of Dodge. There’s an interesting shift in our perspective about America once it was no longer a foregone conclusion that we’d live their for our entire lives, but that’s a different blog post.

I can just smell the eye-rolling out there in internet land. Most of you readers know me well, (we haven’t been advertising or anything so our reach is pretty modest) so you know I’m hardly slow to see the more jaundiced view of things. I know how all of this sounds. Neither of us has any delusion that this is guaranteed to work out. It absolutely could be a boondoggle of historic proportions. We may end up being the object lesson that you scare your children with when they concoct some harebrained scheme. (“You want to start a dog bakery?? You remember what happened to Uncle John and Aunt Lisa, right? Do you really want to live in a box under the overpass? In KENTUCKY??”) But luck, as they say, is the meeting of opportunity and preparation. We’ve been preparing ourselves for this sort of adventure for many years now, and economic conditions are such that the opportunity has presented itself. We’re going to go see if we can get lucky.