Our friends have a lovely condo about a five minute walk from water (and probably fifteen minutes to the nice spots if you want to hang out) and their place catches lovely breezes pretty much all day. The design of their home takes full advantage; we don’t know the exact numbers but probably a third or more of their square-footage (or square-meterage here, I guess?) is outside on their huge patio. Think of a modern apartment’s open concept living and dining space, then knock out most of the walls. Because of the boys they actually turned the whole thing into an enormous catio, so the whole family can spend as much time as they want outside. These little once-feral dudes have no idea how well they scored in the humans department!

That said, other than playing with cats and enjoying the weather, it wasn’t really an adventure-filled trip. What we did do was eat well, especially seafood. During our cat-sit, we ate out at three restaurants, all very different, and all typical of what we’ve come to think of as Portuguese.

The first is Ondas Sobre O Mar (Waves Over The Sea), a beachside restaurant open all day specializing in, you guessed it, fish. A local institution, Ondas has been a part of the Perafita community Lots of locals here and from the size of it, it gets busy on weekends, perhaps at dinner time. We;d been here before, with friends, but never at a time we needed to make reservations. We started with pataniscas (shredded cod fritters) and bread with parsley flavored butter. Then we shared a whole fish, grilled Sea Bass (robalo), at the recommendation of the server and it was perfection. The fish was de-boned tableside (always fun) and came with rice and Rojões in the Minho style, and oven-roasted potatoes. The weather was fine, not too hot, and we enjoyed making up background stories for the various people — singles and in groups — walking the caminho on the boardwalk right next to the restaurant. An excellent start to the ‘sit.

1858 bbgourmet is an odd duck that friends recommended to us. A year ago, this century-old house on Rua de Cedofeita was in ruins. Today, it is part of the Oporto Serviced Apartments group and hides, on the first floor, the 1858 bbGourmet restaurant. Heading the kitchen is chef Elisabete Pinto, who produces interesting combinations that leave you satiated and excited to return. The group runs a hotel, serviced apartments, a gourmet grocery, home delivery, online grocery store, artisanal bakery, and several restaurants. Along with a well thought out a la carte menu, they offer two “tasting moments”, one of which (45eu) was what we had.

We started with Braised Salmon, Orange Sauce, Pickled Cucumber, a small portion, perfectly presented. The salmon was silky and vibrant with flavor accented by the pickly citrus additions. Next came the Salt Cod in the Oven, Chickpea, Spinach . The “Main” was an excellently prepared Beef Short Rib with an absolutely perfect Parmesan Risotto. Melt in the mouth tenderness, rich flavor, a true highlight. We finished with Guava and Cheese, which turned out to be white chocolate ice cream atop a guava sauce. Simple, rich, and a lovely end to the meal. A wine accompaniment was an additional 21eu and consisted of:

• Vicentino Rosé 2023, 100% pinot noir 100 grapes I’m not much of a rose drinker, but this was a lovely accompaniment to the salmon and cod.

• Passagem Reserva Red 2020, Douro, Quinta de la Rosa, blend. A rich fruity chocolate wine
  Porto Tawny 10 Years. A classic for a reason and a nice way to finish a superb meal.

Portions were good, we never felt shorted and would recommend this for a bit of a special occasion meal anytime.

Open daily, Caqui Brunch Bar (caqui means persimmon) appealed to us as a place to have breakfast on our way back to Braga. Plus, they offered pancakes! The day was pouring rain, so parking was a breeze — being on the beach it would be a nightmare on sunny days or high season. Excellent hot drinks — latte for Lisa, hot chocolate for John — and the orange juice was freshly squeezed. They offer a seemingly complete variety of brunch options — egg dishes, toasts, bagels, tacos, pokes, and the enticing pancakes. Lisa had the savory pancakes (bacon, cheddar cheese) with a fried egg. John had a couple of simple pancakes with honey. We both agreed that while the flavor was fine, the texture was weird. Lisa was disappointed that her pancake was simple with the bacon and cheese and egg just layered on top. (It made for a gooey mess. She wasn’t a fan.) John thought his were fine, but not worth a repeat visit. As we were paying and leaving, we discovered that the pancakes had somehow been marked gluten-free. Which explains the odd texture.

It has been a long time away from home at this point. For more than a month we have toured large swaths of North America; seeing friends old and new, catching up with every corner of our families. Surprisingly (to us, at least) we had not burned out on traveling. Long time readers may recognize a familiar thread in many of our trip recaps along the lines of “welp, this was fun but the last few days felt like a chore and we just wanted to be home.” There was none of that so far, on what had already been the longest trip we’ve been on since we retired to The Continent. (You can hear the “but” coming, can’t you?) But, we weren’t done yet. We had decided to punctuate this whole expedition with a fancy-pants cruise across the Atlantic aboard the Queen Mary 2. So, how was that?

In short, it was “fine.” Not a sarcastic “fine”, a legitimate C+/B-, had a fine time. Let’s dig, shall we? When we left off last time, we had gone to sleep in a holding position due to some technical difficulties with the Queen Mary (QM2). We awoke to a ship on the move, pushing north with the American coast barely in sight. That would last for a day or so until we turned east and made for Southampton – our final destination. We actually had to look out the window to see that we were moving; under normal circumstances there was barely any motion at all, and neither of us ever had even a hint of seasickness (yay!). As we made our way east it turned out that we were racing a pretty serious storm system, causing the captain to pick up the pace to run ahead of choppy seas. We still got a little taste of it, with a couple days in which holding onto the ubiquitous handrails was necessary. For our European friends, you may remember really windy days in the middle of October that were so severe that everyone received emergency SMS on their phones about it. That’s what we were staying ahead of, and it had the serendipitious effect of making up any time we lost from the technical snafu on day 1. That’s the nuts and bolts of the route, but what about the cruising experience itself?

The QM2 is basically a very nice hotel on “wheels”, that does a pretty good job in most ways of minimizing the hotel-y feel of things. You don’t feel like you’re in a palace or anything, you’re definitely on hotel furniture in hotel accomodations, just in the middle of the ocean. That said, nothing ever felt cheap or looked like they were cutting corners. We were never uncomfortable. Dining was similar – they’re serving food at the scale of a major convention center, but have worked very hard to minimize the cattle-call nature of dinner and it mostly worked out. Likewise the quality of the food – it’s certainly better than average and was sort of like being at a nice wedding. There would be two or three options for your dinner entree and it was nicely prepared, but you wouldn’t mistake it for a tailored meal in a restaurant. Dinner was the only meal they have to be so regimented with the schedule (two seatings a night, go to your assigned table please) while breakfast and lunch were lightly-enough attended that you could be flexible in timing and where you sat. There were a couple of “restaurants” as well, which you could make a reservation at and pay a surcharge, and those had more robust menus and less banquet-style seating, but in most other ways the “hotel” vibe was still strong. Wait – did we say supplement? Ah yes, paying for things.

Our floating hotel was actually a floating all-inclusive type thing. (By the way, a lot of this is old hat if you’ve ever been on a cruise of any sort before, but it was all news to us!) Everything was included except for beverages, plus as we said above there were some “luxe” dining options that would tag you for an extra $30 or so. Were those options nice? Sure. Did we do it twice? No. So take that for what you will. If you weren’t in the mood to see other people, room service was also included for most things? Did John ever say “what the hell!” and have an ice cream sundae just show up? Maaaaaaaybe. On top of all this there’s a buffet/cafeteria setup that was open pretty much constantly, and then there were several “bars” – we’re still in hotel land, but they dress up different rooms like an English pub and a wine bar and a jazz joint etc… Speaking of bars, beverages past water were a separate charge but were actually not obscenely overpriced. There were “drinks packages” you could add to your bill to get all of your beverages “free” (aka included in the package) but we did the math and quickly concluded that we’d die of alcohol poisoning if we tried to get our money’s worth out of those packages; either there are more inveterate alcoholics on that ship than we realized, or some people just don’t want to have to think about prices. Oooookay.

So, food, got it. What do you do with your time, though? Unlike most cruises, we had no ports-of-call along the route, so there’s no “leave the ship for a day of zip lining before sailing to the next overgrown village” to break things up. Instead, they have a vast smorgasbord of activities to take part in. Watercolor lessons, play-writing workshops, concerts, lectures on diverse topics like astronomy or the wives of Henry VIII of England, dancing lessons in various styles… the list goes on. The trick is, there can be two or three such activities going on at any time, but in order to try and have topics of interest for all people it is a wild patchwork quilt of a schedule. There were a couple of days where we looked at the coming itinerary and thought “my goodness how will we do everything that we want?!” and even split up to cover more bases. But, there were also a couple days where absolutely nothing looked interesting to us, and we were left with a vast ocean and an equally vast swath of empty time on our schedules. You just never knew.

If nothing appealed to you on the calendar, they had some lovely spots to sit by windows and watch the world go by, and there was even a pretty substantial library tucked away with (we’re told) some 10,000 volumes in the catalog. Numerous music groups (a folk duo, a couple of jazz combos, a harpist) rotated through different parts of the ship; you could easily pass the time amiably, if aimlessly, at any point. And so, when you get down to the question of “how was it?” it boils down to “how many offerings were coincidentally things that you were interested in?” We had a fair number, so we had a fair time. It may be that our tiredness for travel was finally kicking in, but we just never fell in love with the whole affair – we’re glad we did it, but odds are low that we’d do it again.

Oh! There’s a casino. Sorry; neither of us are into that, so it was a complete blank in our memories until just this moment. At least it was quiet; you never walked anywhere on the ship and heard the characteristic blaring, jangly sounds of the classic casino floor.

Disembarking in Southamption was an incredibly smooth affair – one of the things we did admire about the cruise was the efficiency that had been baked into so many processes that could have been tedious grinds. We had a very specific window of time to leave (something like 8:06; you get the idea), at which time we walked right out and down to a bus that, when it filled up with the pre-assigned passengers, scooted down the highway to Heathrow airport. (They had a customs and immigration official who makes the journey specifically so they can process all of our traveling documents during the week of travel; another civilized touch.) We did our usual maneuver of having a hotel room booked at the hotel so that there was all the time in the world for something to go wrong without us missing our flight. Sure enough, our last little jog – the flight from London to Porto and then home with Orlando – was as smooth as a train on greased rails. That’s a thing, right? Anyway. Thousands of miles, hundreds of meals, dozens of friends and family seen, and finally – home.

So, as our last post explained, the trip we had planned to take toward the end of January just kind of fizzled out. Boo. Thus, our actual kick-off to TravelFest 2023 is a 10-ish day excursion to Italy. For those unfamiliar with how our brains work, the planning for this trip went something like this: “I (Lisa) have always wanted to go to Carnival in Venice.” “Well, I (John) think that’s a great idea, but if we’re going to go to the trouble of packing our bags and getting on a plane, we might as well see other things, too, right?” And thus has trouble often emerged. This time, it feels like we kept things pretty well under control. It’s five days in Rome, followed by five days in Venice, then home. Nice and tight. I mean… it’s not really, not at all. More like, “it could have been so much worse.” But, hey! Rome! Neat, right?

By the standards of some of our trips, we got to wake up at an incredibly sane 7 AM to make our 8 AM bus for Porto. Brief diversion: buses are much more a part of our life than previously and certainly if you ignore daily work commutes. We now take the bus to *places*. [Granted, most of those places so far are the airport in Porto, but we have plans for more!] There are multiple bus companies in Portugal and, indeed, all over Europe. As a result, they have to be cleaner and cheaper than, say, Greyhound or else people will use the competition. We take an immaculate bus straight to the airport curbside for about eight bucks. Sadly (we think) the other end of the bus ride holds disappointment, as we have swallowed hard and booked our flight on Ryanair. As has been previously reported, we aren’t fans but, of course, they sing the siren song of low fares and we sailed right back to them. Cue our shock when we ended up having an acceptable experience! Despite the line for our flight not opening at the check-in counter for more than an hour after we arrived, a lovely attendant in a different line waved us over and checked us in! Might sound simple, but nothing was simple about Ryanair last time. We were able to meander through security, have a coffee as we saw fit, and get to our gate area with no trouble. Pre-boarding was also painless, except for a landmark event for John: a younger person gave up their seat so that he could sit down. John tried to wave it off, but the young man and his girlfriend insisted that he please take a seat next to Lisa. There was nothing for it but to sit down. Ouch. The flight itself was relatively painless, just the usual advertising pitches. (If you haven’t been on a Ryanair flight before, the cabin is festooned with marketing signage and they use the P.A. system to actively push “great values!” from the duty-free. It’s…. whatever. Life these days, I guess.)

We flew into Ciampino airport for the first time – it’s the Gatwick of Rome, if that makes any sense. In other words, there was a bus transfer to the train station followed by a 20 minute train ride to Rome’s Termini station. Yes, we know that’s like the soup du jour of the day or the ATM machine, but that’s the name of the thing. And not to be a broken record, but man is train travel lovely. None of this “outskirts of town” nonsense, you’re right in the heart of the city immediately. You’re also five minutes from the public streets, rather than circuitously navigating through a cavernous airport. Horses for courses and all that, but we do love a good train. The taxi stand in front of the station was actually a lot saner than we’re used to, and it was simplicity itself to book our ride to our home for the next few days, the Palm Suite. The location is phenomenal. This is not a budget accommodation; we don’t often go for luxury, but we will occasionally pay for access/location, and we are in the middle of everything.

After a day of travel we did not feel like doing much in the way of tourism, but just getting to dinner for the evening caused us to circle around the Colosseum, so … yeah. Beautiful. Our meal was at Contrario, or at least one of them. They have a Bistro and a “Vineria con Cucina” which translates, I believe, into “booze and nummies.” Whatever we’re calling it, we had a dang fine meal. It was only a little odd at first because we’d specifically told the concierge that we’d be eating all sorts of adventurous things this week and could we just start off with a straight-down-the-middle, traditional Italian joint. What we got was Italian classics juged up with modern sensibilities. Whatever we’re calling it, it was a truly delicious meal. We began by sharing a dish of Giuarda (Jewish) style artichokes (deep fried) with a Taleggio cheese fondue which was fantastic. But the standout may have been the pasta course we shared, a manicotti with minced sausage (Norcia) and a sauce of roman peccorino cheese and broccoli that had been pureed into almost non-existence and yet still infused everything with flavor. Hard to describe but bonkers good. John had a dish from the day’s specials — veal saltimboca, perfectly prepared and flavorful. Lisa had the beef cheek, meltingly tender and rich, served over mashed potatoes. They had an Amarone della Valpolicella Classico for 10eu/ glass, which was a perfect choice. But Lisa notes that they take their wine seriously and have a binder of options — 50 pages! So this is a great place to explore a variety of wines under the guidance of the knowledgeable staff. This was as good an end to a day as we were going to get, and we knew it. A lovely walk back home and into bed.

The rest of Rome awaits!

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.