So, Lisa’s mother is an artist who has worked in numerous mediums and formats throughout her life. One of these is photography; we had her work hanging in our home for years and years (only stopping because of the great divestiture before moving to Portugal). Somehow – I do not know this part of the story – she developed a relationship with a gallery in Barcelona: Fotonostrum and they have displayed at least three of her photos as parts of exhibitions. However, at the conclusion of the exhibitions there have been attempts to ship the photos to her home in San Francisco and it just never seems to happen. Recently, we were told that the latest exhibition that included her work had come to an end, and they needed to leave the gallery by the end of May or they would “go into storage.” Yeah, storage in a nice farm upstate. Rather than try and sort out mail or courier options that had been fruitless for months, we decided to try a different approach.

And thus it was that I took the most curious ramble yet. I started by catching a 6:30AM bus for Porto. If you haven’t cottoned to it, bus travel in Portugal as compared to the US is a lot like the differences in train travel. Here, it’s relatively inexpensive, widely available, and generally a clean and pleasant experience. The next segment of the trip was my favorite, for reasons other than the amenities. I caught a direct flight on Vueling, a low-cost airline I had never heard of before. They were about the same as the others, with cheap base tickets that get more expensive pretty quickly if you add features, and flights for which “no-frills” is a pretty reasonable description. So what was my excitement all about? For the first time since we moved here, I finally took one of these flights with no additions. Normally we’re at least traveling with some luggage, and maybe care about what seats we’re sitting in (like, two seats next to each other at a minimum). But all I had this time was a backpack that fits under the seat. And it’s just me, put me where you want. It was great! The fifty-euro ticket actually was a fifty-euro ticket.

Barcelona airport is easy enough to navigate and I hit the curb with little difficulty, and caught a cab. (I would have gone public transport but I was on a schedule and, shockingly, the signs were in a language I understand even less that Portuguese.) Then the hose kinks start appearing. Fotonostrum was changing locations soon, but the address that I harvested from the email signature of my contact person was for their new, still-unused location. Who does that? Well… Spanish artistic types do, apparently. So, a second cab is hailed and the old location is achieved. Interesting side note: Barcelona is still a city of taxis. I don’t know if they’ve got laws limiting rideshare services but this was classic, New York-syle cab hailing and it never took much effort. I was pleased and surprised.

There’s a clock ticking in the background. I have a 3:30PM reservation for a train, but if I get my business tended to I could catch an earlier, 1:30PM, train. That appeals to me greatly. Why a train? While two of the photos are rolled and in a tube, the third is mounted and can only be transported flat as-is. We just didn’t trust baggage handling (or overhead compartments) to preserve the photo, so settled on the train as a viable alternative.

So, tick tock. Even with the delay of an extra cab ride it’s still only about 12:15 and the gallery is approximately 20 minutes from the train station. It takes me an embarrassingly long time to figure out where the door to the gallery is, despite having an accurate address, but eventually I get in and speak to a nice, artsy Spanish youth…. who explains to me that my contact is currently conducting a press conference(!?) and nobody else knows what I was talking about. In their defense (and my amazement), a press conference actually is going on in the gallery, which impressed me. Good on the Spanish for lavishing such attention on a little gallery of no particular import that is discussing their move to a new space.

My hopes for a timely exit dwindle, and I rummage for a place to eat. I settle on Pizza Local where, despite the name, what I had was a “straciatella with burrata” that was mind-blowingly good. Sadly the photo is “nom medias res” but the idea is a layer of burrata that covers the entire plate evenly, then drizzled with oil and seasonings. This is used as “dipping sauce” so to speak for fresh-baked flatbread. Woof. Post lunch a very nice woman at the gallery promptly hands over the tube and the mounted photo… at about 2:00PM. Alas. We’ve been to Barcelona Sants train station before, although this time I’m just passing through. Boarding the train was easy enough, and as a high speed train we were flying through the Spanish countryside at just under 300kph. Wheee!

The next kink in the hose is that my train terminates in Madrid and I catch another one to get to Vigo. That train goes out of a different station, but the train operator’s website implies that they have purpose-made transfer busses between stations. Whether that’s a lie or just the signs were in Spanish is up for debate; what I know is that I couldn’t find the bus, my train had been running about a half hour late, and I had 45 minutes to figure it out or I’d be spending the evening in scenic Madrid. Several “what the hell let’s see what happens!” decisions later, I sit down in my seat with about 3 minutes to spare. Fun! Fortunately, after this the only adventure was when there was only one seat left on the bus from Vigo to Braga and they didn’t take cash, so I had to scramble to get a ticket on their website. As I am writing this in my office in Braga, you can guess how that turned out.

All told, the trip took about 19 hours, which is honestly not that bad in my opinion given how much was packed in. The photos made it safely and now await the arrangement of the last leg of their journey, back to the United States.

We named this blog “The Ramble”, but all we really did was fly to Portugal and sit tight. We could’ve just called it “The Move” as far as y’all can tell, right? Well that’s (finally!) about to change. As we may have mentioned before, there was a period during the whole D7-application / sell our house / retire from work bundle of chaos when we just were snow-blind with tasks and stress. To try to combat this, we started to plan our first exploration of Europe, as a reminder of why we were making ourselves go through all of the hassle in the first place. We had certain rough ideals for this trip: it needed to be substantial in distance and time. It needed to include multiple countries. And, it had to involve lots if not exclusively trains. None of these had a practical reason; these were the most-repeated things we had day-dreamed about when we were still “only” fantasizing about this lifestyle, and by golly we were going to do them. A trip slowly came together: five weeks out, beginning with a flight to Paris for a 2-week stay (a lower but still important dream point – spend more time in Paris at once than previous vacations had allowed), then the train to Zurich, Vienna, and Prague, and a flight home to Portugal. The reasons for these destinations were varied – some we really wanted to see, some were just roughly in a line so the train would be easy to figure. Prague and Vienna were definitely on the list at least partially because we had not ever had them on a list of prime vacation locations, and we want to start including places that are probably amazing but wouldn’t have made the cut on a once-every-three-years vacation. So there we had it. Dates were penciled in, methods of travel scouted, there were even some AirBnB reservations made.

“Mann traoch, Gott Lauch” is an old Yiddish proverb that translates to “Man plans, God laughs.” You may know the less succinct English version: if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. Anyway, without doing a recap of the news for the last 6 months but as a reminder to possible readers in the distant future: COVID has been spiking all over the world here thanks to the Omicron variant that seems super transmissible if not quite so deadly(?). Countries that had been feeling pretty good about their vaccination rates are seeing their case #s spiking up and up. As a result, more restrictions have been coming online. That’s the reason that we scrambled with what had been a pretty set agenda in just the last couple weeks before setting out. In the end, thanks to a mandatory 10-day quarantine in Germany regardless of vaccination status, we re-calibrated the trip to be ~4 weeks. One week in Barcelona, one week in Paris, and the rest of our time rambling through the Loire valley. Obviously this is not a trip to cry about, and we just added the places that were scrapped from our itinerary to the pile of places we plan to visit in the future. The other puzzle piece that we had to build around was a negative COVID test prior to getting on the plane to Barcelona. We still aren’t 100% sure that we needed it, but Ryanair couldn’t be trusted to give us a straight answer (more on them later) so we played it safe. Playing it safe, however, meant getting to Porto, Portugal a day earlier than we had planned so we could make an appointment. Long and not very interesting story short, we got successful tests and stayed, kind of accidentally, at an amazing, old-world 5 star hotel – Hotel Infante Sagres. Classy everything, windows that open, all the little touches of places that haven’t adopted modern service standards. We’d never pay money for it (this was a use of Hyatt points) but we also aren’t sorry we stayed. Like, at all.

As we jaunted off to the airport, we realized with some bemusement that we had not ventured out for one second to see any of Porto, our first destination in Portugal since arriving in Braga a month prior. Turns out neither of us was interested in such an abbreviated peek; we’re saving it for a longer visit when we can really sink our teeth into the place. In any case, we got to learn plenty once we got to Francisco Sa Carneiro Airport. Nothing shocking, just the dozen little ways that business is done differently, that “everybody” knows but we had to figure out. Things like:

• Desks at the departure area aren’t just by airline but by flight. We easily could have stood in a Ryanair line for 45 minutes only to discover that the employee would only process us if we were going to Madrid.
• This also means that plans like “we’ll get to the airport early to be extra safe, we can always cool our heels at a cafe” are pointless. You’ll be saddled with your luggage and on the outside of the secure area, until the passenger-processing machine lurches into motion, on their schedule. A schedule which is designed to check you in, put you through security, and shunt you to your gate with precious little down time, even though it is all in service to classic “hurry up and wait” shenanigans.
• They were already “boarding” our flight as we made it through security even though we weren’t due to take off for like an hour. Turns out they pre-process you into a holding pen that, as far as we could tell, did nothing to ensure a smoother boarding process. You’re back to sitting willy-nilly in this area, no lines by priority or boarding group or anything. And when they opened the doors for us to go out, there was absolutely no rhyme or reason to it. Hope you didn’t pay a little extra for priority boarding! (ahem)

About Ryanair. I was commiserating with a friend recently and settled on the idea that Ryanair’s business plan was to take all the dials that might default to “5” on 1-10 and turn them all down to about “3”. Anything lower than that on any aspect (comfort, process, provisions, safety, whatever. . .) and you would have a strong reason not to fly with them again. But on “3”s you just think “well that was terrible” but then the next time you’re booking a flight you might tell yourself “it wasn’t that bad, and we’ll save 100 euros…” Along those lines, we don’t have any “they were godawful at XYZ” stories, they were just less-than-mediocre at practically everything about the commercial flying process.

In any event, apparently even Ryanair can’t get screw up a flight this short too badly. They had just enough time to squeeze in their Price is Right, Showcase Showdown-style walk through of the Duty Free catalog (I shit you not… Europeans are nodding along like “of course!” but Americans probably don’t even believe me…) before we landed. Passengers applauded when we did. It was not rainy or windy, just an everyday landing. I don’t know if European travelers are just better at practicing gratitude in their life (go Buddhists!) or if we were just given a warning about how bad Ryanair actually is, that they were pleasantly surprised by an uneventful touchdown. We get our bags and step up to the taxi stand, give an address, and off we go.

Y’all.

The Christmas (Advent? More on this later…) lights in Barcelona are uh-MAY-zing. Street after street had elaborate light displays running the length of them. I tried to get a picture once, but standing in the middle of the street is, unsurprisingly, a tricky angle to achieve. We were driven through the city and we mostly just stared, occassionally nudging each other to “ooo look that way!” Thanks to this, in almost no time we arrived to our AirBnB – Carrer de Valencia, 366, if you’re in the market I can recommend. We settled in without difficulty and went to sleep with visions of absurd, smooshy spires dancing in our heads. We were not disappointed, but that’s next time.