I’ve already posted the Portugal video, so I don’t need to explain that we spent efterårsferie down in Portugal this year. And obviously this post is almost entirely devoted to that trip.
Almost.
For although daily autumn life is busy and hectic and not particularly photogenic, there are nevertheless moments of value now and then.
Like when your dog smiles up at you for no apparent reason.
Or you find an inexplicable printout lying with a bunch of other papers on the coffee table.
(The spelling and punctuation established authorship, but the content was deeply mysterious. What dress code? What precedent? What senior problem? Well, apparently the author had stumbled across a YouTube video posted by a beleaguered high school senior somewhere in America whose school was instituting a dress code mandating skirts have a certain minimum length: the author was therefore appealing to the president for relief from this oppressive clothing regime.)
And there are non-photo-friendly moments like when your favorite quarterback comes back from suspension, and your favorite tight end raids the English language to celebrate his return.
Ampness indeed.
And sometimes you stumble across milestone moments of relatives you haven’t seen in years, like the marriage of a second cousin.
And sometimes there’s magic right under your nose under the most ordinary of circumstances.
And everyday magic cuts both ways: there are curses as well, like when you break the mug you’ve been drinking coffee out of every day for nine years, a mug that was the first gift you ever got from a child of your own:
(RIP, scribble mug.)
But the real magic begins when it’s time to start packing for adventure!
And no one likes to wake up at 3:30 in the morning, even for adventure, but the girls bore it pretty well and settled right in for the trip.
Hours later we were Portugal — cool, gray, misty Portugal.
But everything’s relative: we had just left cooler, grayer, mistier Copenhagen and knew things were a million times better in Portugal!
(Or a little better, anyway.)
The Bimbo brand just always slays me.
And it’s such a joy to see real onions… it doesn’t really read in this photo, but some of these onions are softball-sized. Softball-sized!
I’ve tried very hard once again to limit the scenery pix and focus on pictures of the girls (and sometimes Trine — and on a few wild occasions even myself). But we need at least one establishing shot of Casa Schultz:
We’d left Didi at home, but with Flash, Tara, and Lassie there were dogs enough to keep us happy. Actually, Flash alone was enough to keep us happy. Tara kind of freaked us out. And Lassie is such an anxious thing she couldn’t really handle us.
But Flash was a champ, and very Didi-like in his affection.
I wasn’t kidding about arriving to chilly air and gray skies. They lasted less than 24 hours. From the morning we woke up in Portugal until the day before we left, we experienced all the sun, warmth, and blue skies we could have asked for.
That shot’s actually an iPhone “panorama,” which is why it has the weird curvature.
This is Maddie before breakfast. Every day.
Most days she and I took a dip before breakfast, and the joy of having a swim, in the sun, in October, before breakfast, was a treat to be savored. (Most mornings, however, she and I were the only ones who thought so.)
“But wait,” you say, “First you say, ‘This is Maddie before breakfast every day,’ then you say, ‘Most days we swam before breakfast.’ Which is it?”
Maddie was in her bathing suit and ready to swim before breakfast every day. I was ready to join her most days. And sometimes others joined us.
So the pre-breakfast ritual was slightly inconsistent, but I don’t think there was a single day during the whole visit that we weren’t all four in the pool right after breakfast.
Recognize the rafts? We bought them last time we were in Portugal. The girls loved them so much we brought them home to Denmark with us. They’ve been in the garage for 4½ years. We brought them back on this trip and learned two things: (1) the girls have grown an awful lot, and (2) the rafts are not as fun as we remembered them (mainly because the girls have grown an awful lot). Not long after the above picture was taken we set them aside. They sat aside the rest of the visit… and they did not come back to Denmark with us.
In a world where only you take the pictures, sometimes you gotta selfie.
The grocery stores were a lot of fun. The video has Molli and Maddie’s reactions to the big bags of chicken feet in the meat section: here they are watching in awe as the fishmonger hacks a whole fish into sections.
The girls discovered the hammocks very quickly and claimed them as their quiet place. There was no internet access out there, so they both got into a habit of trotting out there from time to time with books in hand. Nothing on the whole trip made me happier than the sight of my daughters chilling in the hammocks with their books. (No books in these pictures, but they’re from our first day.)
The sunsets were spectacular.
I drew your attention in the video to Maddie’s diving progress over the course of our vacation: here she is in her frog-squat position on the first or second day there. She would squat there for whole minutes at a stretch building up her courage, then plunk! into the water head-first. Falling more than diving, but she hit the water head first every time.
FIESA Sand City, in Pêra, doesn’t look like much from the dusty little parking lot across the street.
Once you’ve paid the obscene admission fee and stepped inside, however, it’s very different from anything you’ve ever seen before (assuming you haven’t seen acres of massive sand sculptures before).
Now, I must have taken fifty or sixty pictures of the sculptures without any people in frame. They’re good pictures and I’m happy to have taken them. But you can view even better photos of the same thing by Googling FIESA Sand City and going to their website, where you can also learn more about the display, the artists, and why all the sculptures are of musicians, composers, singers, and dancers.
So with a couple of exceptions, I’m limiting myself to people pictures from Sand City.
Frankenstein: composer, singer, dancer, or musician? Find out on the website! (And notice they have virtually the same exact photograph on their front page.)
I also included my picture of the Stones because that’s how I roll.
And the Pink Floyd The Wall sculpture was too coolly surreal not to include.
It was about 27C in the shade that day, and you’ll notice there is no shade in the scultpure area. After wandering around about 45 minutes we were all pretty scorched, so we got some drinks and ice cream. And as we cooled off in the shaded snack area, digital reality intruded almost immediately.
Back at Casa Schultz, the heat drove the girls straight into their quiet places.
And things finally cooled down a little as the sun went down.
We ended each of the first few nights there with rousing games of “The Five Second Rule.” You don’t compete by diving for food your opponents have dropped on the floor: you simply have five seconds to give at least three answers to a question like, “Name a city in England,” or “Name a fruit you have to peel to eat.”
Maddie insisted on being our emcee, and to keep things fair she would translate the questions to Danish on the fly for her mother and grandfather, but leave them in English for her father and sister. She did a great job — I was awed and envious of the ease with which she did it — but she also made some hilarious mistakes by making literal translations or simple mistranslations that rendered the questions surreal in Danish.
The best was when she asked Mor and Morfar to “nævn tre ting, man kand finde i en dessert” (name three things you find in a dessert).
Molli Malou and I challenged some of the answers our opponents provided, because they were naming dessert dishes rather than things you would find within a dessert dish (that is, “cake” or “pie” instead of things like “sugar” or “cream” or even “a lot of calories”). So we asked Maddie for the exact wording of the question.
The exact wording of the question was, in English: “Name three things you can find in a desert.”
It was hilarious at the time.
Maybe you had to be there.
Weirdly enough, during our first shopping trip I had come across a Dean Koontz book set in New Orleans and had bought it to serve as my vacation book. (I’ve been reading Rousseau’s Confessions and it just didn’t seem like the kind of thing to be reading by a pool.) Inevitably there were mentions of Bougainvillea creeping all over everything — and the scent of jasmine filling the air every evening.
I know the scent of jasmine, but I actually never knew its scent only came out at night.
And then a propos of nothing at dinner one night, Morfar told us to be sure to smell the jasmine plants once the sun went down.
I didn’t know about Night Jasmine.
We smelled it at night — rich, fragrant, wonderful!
And we smelled it during broad daylight:
Smelled like… leaves.
We had a lot of fun with the talking ball. . .
And enjoyed late night swims.
One morning we went into Faro after breakfast.
We had made the plan the previous evening — if you can call, “Hey, let’s go to Faro” a plan — and in preparation I called up this blog to look at our 2012 visit and see if there were things I thought we should try to do (or avoid) while in the seat of Algarve.
I found both. On the list of things to avoid: the pizza place where we’d had lunch.
On the list of things to pursue: recreation of poses taken 4½ years ago!
So, as seen on Facebook, first we have Molli Malou a few months shy of 8 (Maddie’s exact age now) and then again now a few months after turning 12:
And next we have Maddie at about 3½ followed by Maddie now, a couple of months shy of being 8:
Walking by a jewelry store with the three of them is like walking by the butcher’s with Didi.
And dear posterity, please note: Molli Malou and Trine did not synchronize outfits. There had simply been a mad rush to get dressed and into the car after breakfast, and somehow only after getting out of the car in Faro did mother and daughter realize — to the amusement of one and the horror of the other — that they were so well coordinated.
There are so many ruins all over Portugal. By the end of the trip we were all singing the Lego Movie theme song with slightly altered lyrics: Everything is broken. . .
Just outside one of the gates to the old walled part of the city we stumbled across a tented kind of flea market.
And on the other side of the flea market, we were — honestly — astonished to find a carnival! It was closed for siesta, but we were promised the rides would all open at 15:00.
No people in this next shot, but I thought maybe someone with a connection to a good copyright lawyer might want to pass it along. . .
Not a great picture, below, but for some reason I like it. Maybe I just can’t get enough of the coordinated outfits.
Eventually we had to have lunch. Our only criterion was that it should not be at the place we’d eaten in 2012, where we’d been served the worst pizzas ever. But we couldn’t figure out which place it had been, exactly — there’d been a lot of renovation — so as we wandered around trying to figure out which place was Awfulest Pizza Ever place, we stumbled by a steak house whose pitch man gave us such an enticing description of the gastronomical delights of the establishment that we succumbed and took a table.
The ribeyes were glorious.
The black angus burgers were glorious.
It was, in fact, all so glorious that the girls called Mormor to tell her how glorious everything was there in the Faro sunshine. We were all delighted to hear it was cold and rainy in Denmark.
A little boy was blowing bubbles in the street not far from our table, and Maddie was unable to resist trying to catch them.
“Hi, we’re from Denmark, but while we’re in Portugal we’d like to shop for heavy winter coats. Have you got any?”
(We actually bought it, and Molli Malou has been very happy for it the past couple of weeks.)
Here’s Maddie outside the walled city.
And here, after lunch, is our return to the carnival.
The girls and I really wanted to kick things off on the ferris wheel. We went and were thrilled to see there was no line.
It was about 15:10.
We asked the guy there, “Are you open?”
“Yes,” he said, nodding. “Open.”
“Where do we get tickets?”
He pointed to a shuttered kiosk.
“They look closed,” I said.
He shrugged.
“They not here yet,” he said.
Yay for Southern Europe!
We ended up having a great time on the bumper cars — really the best bumper car ride of my life, seeing as how we got to ride for about 15 minutes — and then the girls and I returned to the finally-opened ferris wheel.
It was nice view.
Why don’t they have snack carts like this at Tivoli? Or in Central Park?
Back at Casa Schultz there was, of course, plenty of time for an evening swim.
This next shot is important.
That’s obviously Molli, obviously in a chair, obviously with her iPhone. She’s there because it was the best spot on the ground floor for wifi. It therefore became her particular place. I don’t know how many cumulative hours she spent there over the course of our vacation, but I would guess (conservatively) that she spent at least two hours of every in that chair, with her iPhone, snapchatting with friends.
It was a great relief to get out to the Splash & Slide waterpark the next day. Slogan: “We don’t have no stinkin’ wifi.”
And again: it’s never too late for a swim.
We worked hard to give the girls a good vacation, but we also made sure that Mor and Daddy got to relax as well.
And the girls were lucky enough to have Maria custom tailor dresses for them!
I already said the sunsets were spectacular. But, I mean… there’s spectacular and there’s specatacular with a capital F:
Here’s Molli Malou modeling her irresistable Loulé original:
And Maddie’s:
One evening Morfar announced that he would be shaving the very next day. I tend not to announce such things a day in advance — it would be a tedious daily announcement — but Morfar’s announcement was justified in that he had not been cleanshaven since at least the days when there was a Nixon in the White House.
We decided to take before and after pictures.
I don’t think chronology is very important on vacation, but just for the record: the after pictures were obviously from the following night, so we now resume our blog (already in progress) on the evening of the “before” shots.
Maria’s not just a designer and tailor, she’s also a milliner.
Happiness is getting so much sun you need a nap, then waking up and looking out the window and seeing… wait, what?
We spent one entire day just lounging around the pool. From time to time, but each on our own schedule, we would dive into the water and swim a few laps or horse around for a while; then we would lie out in the delicious sunshine and be dry in minutes. Not one of us got a burn!
Some of us took sunbathing to an extreme. (Some of us were therefore lathered in lotion every forty-five minutes or so.)
I love these pictures of the girls in black and white. (We’re playing Talking Ball again.)
Sort of unfair to noisily and wildly play ball right in front of others who really want to join in but cannot…
I like the house from this angle:
Every evenings the dogs got a long walk around the property. Most evenings we tagged along.
We didn’t dine outside every night, but we enjoyed ourselves immensely when we could.
Maria made an incredible dessert one night, and the video does it better justice than this photo, but the video can’t tell you, as I can, that it was meringue and ice cream and fruit and — was there some kind of dessert sauce? I don’t remember. But man, it lived up to its flashy self-promotion.
Heading upstairs one night I chanced to see the full moon out the window in the foyer. I include this piucture only because I like it as a picture.
Maddie needed help on “her” phone one morning (it’s actually the family phone to serve as a replacement for the landline we disconnected a couple of months ago, but we let her be its primary user), and this was the lock screen:
She had actually taken the selfie herself in the car on one of our trips (sure, you can scroll up and figure out which one if you want; I’m too lazy). I mailed it to myself immediately, which is why you can see it here. I think it’s simultaneously hilarious and adorable and would make a great album cover, if there still were such thing as albums.
As I mentioned earlier, on our last full day in country the weather turned on us: clouds rolled in and the temperature cooled. We took a little trip into Loulé.
Timewarp 2: Once again we have Maddie in 2012 aged about 3½ juxtaposed with Maddie a few months before her eighth birthday:
(Future Molli: I did have more shots of you we could have recreated, but you were very growly on the topic.)
Note that the hat Molli Malou is wearing in the picture below is, like virtually everything you see behind her, made of cork. Cork has been historically important as an export from the Algarve region. (It’s actually a wildly interesting region, historically, but I’m not here to bore you about all that.)
Barely perceptible at this resolution: in the photo below, there are two men working on the roof of the building in the background. They had so safety tethers or anything. We were almost afraid to look at them.
“Everything is broken…”
As seen on Facebook: the greatest traffic sign in the history of the world:
Even Molli Malou had to get a picture of it to put on Instagram. (You all follow her on Instagram, right?)
I love Trine’s royal wave down to her adoring subjects down in the pool:
The shot below was taken shortly after our last family swim. You can almost feel the emotions at play: it’s like a visual sigh.
And I like this shot of Molli Malou in her iPhone chair:
On our very last night Maria presented Maddie with her irresistable Loulé original and gave her some modeling tips.
And inevitably it was 3:30 on the Saturday morning of our departure.
How did we ever travel without smart phones and tablets?
Boarding time. . .
And finally we’re back in Copenhagen. A little weird walking out to the airport Metro station still glowing with our tans and seeing all the locals walking toward us wrapped in winter clothing.
We suited up appropriately while waiting for the subway.
And then we were on our way home.
Getting home mid-afternoon on Saturday meant we didn’t have a lot of time to settle in before we had to kick into gear and get ready for the return of real life. It was a drastic and rapid transition, but we made it. We’re back into the regular hectic rhythms of fall: work, school, handball, swim, choir, dance, yardwork, — and we just the other day signed the contract to replace every single window and door in the house.
(We also just got the girls’ 2016 school pictures — shared on Facebook already — but I think they deserve a post of their own.)
The regular rhythm will only carry us another three weeks from this writing, at which point the annual madness of Thanksgiving, Maddie’s birthday, and first Advent will throw us headlong into the insanity of the holidays. It’s strange to be writing about the start of the holiday season while looking over such recent pictures of the family wandering around palm trees in our bathing suits — but strange in a good way. It was a wonderful blast of sunshine and warmth, maybe even enough to sustain us through the long, cold, dark winter ahead.
A guy can hope. . .
Very good post. I especially like the repeatable poses. Envy the pool.