The title’s a little misleading: this post actually covers regular life in September and October as well as the trip to Portugal, so it’s going to be a long one.
September 12th was, as it always is, Trine’s birthday. It happened to coincide with a visit from Gert, so Trine was able to enjoy something neither of us has been able to very often (or at all) lately: a birthday dinner with both parents.
Even Didi was excited.
The menu was the house birthday standard: rib-eyes, bernaise, fries, and plenty of wine.
Didi did not react well to my repeated admonitions that there was no steak for her.
The next picture is blurry and stupid, but I include it for a reason:
It’s a Roomba, which is what Trine wanted and got for her birthday. (So yes, we’ve reached the age where I get a new grill for my birthday, she gets a new vacuum for her birthday, and we’re both thrilled and delighted.) I include the picture as kind of marker: it was September 12, 2017, that the first actual robot entered our home.
There’s video of the great event, and the entire family reacting to the little autonomous vacuum cleaner, which isn’t well-shot or even all that interesting right now, but will some day probably be analagous to watching an old video of some family sitting around their first color television, or their first PC.
In any case, here’s the birthday girl, crowned by a gift from Maddie:
And scenes from the festive feast:
And the luscious cake, with 45 spelled out in home-grown blackberries:
(I first saw the cake upside down and asked Maddie, who’d done the lettering, why she’d put “Sh” on her mother’s cake. Were the grown-ups being too loud? Stupid Daddy, sheesh.)
Another post-it note for the permanent record: this is the Cotes du Rhone that Trine loves. (I note it because we’ve spent literal decades trying out all the Cotes du Rhone that were not the one she loves.)
A propos of nothing: Maddie joining me on a Didi romp at the Old Golf Course.
And who can forget the great audition, down at the Bella Center, to qualify for the national dance championship?
Maddie’s group passed the audition, which was very exciting, until we were informed that it would require an extra dance practice every week for 6 months, entry fees for every event, and would subsequently cost many, many thousands of kroner and require enormous logistical efforts by us.
Sadly, we therefore declined to participate. Happily, Maddie was consoled to learn that we were not the only parents who felt this whole thing had been a bait-and-switch operation, and that other of her “team-mates” had withdrawn when confronted with the prospective tab.
Meanwhile, I can’t remember the source of jubilation you see below, but it’s lovely whatever the cause:
More of Maddie’s literary output (I don’t have the time to translate, it’s just a reminder that she’s still very much entrenched in her writing):
Milestone: the two kids’ bicycles that had been gathering dust (and rust) in the yard for about two years were finally consigned to the recycling bin at the junkyard. Sad to see them go, but they lived excellent lives, were very well treated, and brought vast joy to the two little girls who rode them.
Ironically, it came within a day of another milestone: the felling of the whiteboard at Nana and Pop-Pop’s:
Meanwhile, autumn continues apace: meaning, among other things, handball (lots of handball, now that both girls are playing):
And football!
And getting to work just as the sun peeps over the horizon:
And the big third-grade class musical, in which Maddie was assigned the exact same role (Juliet) as Molli had been so many moons ago:
The premise of the show is that a couple of girls are fighting over a book of fairy-tales, and in their struggle they tear all the pages out. They then put them back together, but in a crazy mixed up way, and the musical is the result of all that mixing up, so that all the fairy-tale characters end up in each other’s stories. It’s a lot of fun.
I don’t have many pictures because I spent most of Maddie’s stage time getting video. I do have those videos and plan to share them, but that’ll probably be later this fall or winter when I have some quiet indoor weekends to play around with video (and get to the summer vacation video and the Portugal vacation video, etc). I’m serious about that this year.
For now: we’re back to handball. Here’s Molli Malou (#39) in action:
Maddie bides her time at Molli’s away games by drawing:
…and monkeying around.
Home interlude:
And now some Maddie handball action (she’s #8)
The pictures above were from a home game Maddie was playing the same night that Molli had a handball tournament from 7pm Friday evening until 7am Saturday morning.
For real. You read that right.
Here are the girls getting ready for their first match of the night:
…and after that, Molli’s family went home. We heard her creep in, exhausted, twelve hours later as the rest of were just starting to wake up.
Maddie, that Saturday, was fortunate enough to get a trip into Halloween Tivoli with Mormor, who was kind enough to share some pictures.
The aforementioned Friday and Saturday were the start of fall vacation. We took it easy for the rest of the weekend, spent Monday prepping the house and packing, and late Tuesday morning we boarded the train.
Which we took to the Metro.
Which got us to the airport. (Where there was, and I’m not exaggerating, no security line.)
That first flight got us to Amsterdam, where we had a traditional Dutch lunch.
And got a few moments of fresh air…
Before boarding the flight to Faro.
We took Transavia airlines. Not a mistake we’ll be likely to repeat again (although the crew on the flight home was fantastic).
Finally Morfar picked us up in Faro around 18:00 local time.
(The guy at the left is me. I bring that to your attention because you won’t see much more of him in this post.)
It’s a short ride to the house, but by the time we were there and unpacked, it didn’t seem like the optimal moment for a swim.
And, frankly, we were all a little tired.
Funny little aside: this is the same room, and the same bed, the girls slept in when we visited last fall. We had brought some library books with us for Maddie last year, but found upon our return to Denmark we no longer had them. We looked all over our house but still couldn’t find them: Gert and Maria looked all over their house and couldn’t find them. So eventually we had to pay hundreds of kroner to the library to replace the books. Which Trine discovered in one of the nightstand drawers just as she was making a final check of the room before we left for the airport at the end of our trip. And the library actually reimbursed us the money we’d paid, so all’s well that ends well.
The weather wasn’t great our first morning there, but I managed to catch a rainbow trying to appear.
I could also see its other end struggling to become a reality (lower right).
It tried and tried to my left…
And tried and tried on my right…
But they never developed much beyond that. Not every metaphor makes it to maturity. There’s probably a metaphor in there, somewhere, but you’ll have to come up with your own.
Maddie was ready for the pool that first morning, but as her body language indicates, the weather wasn’t quite what we’d hoped for. It was still high summer compared to the weather we’d left behind in Denmark, but it wasn’t the sunny paradise we’d remembered from 2016.
This was strange, because just a week earlier it had been over 40 degrees Celsius in Portugal — well over 100 Fahrenheit. Almost too hot.
Also strange: a lot of the peppers on the pepper trees had still not ripened.
(In fairness, though, many had…)
As that first morning became the first afternoon, the weather improved.
We did some grocery shopping that day, and the girls had begged us to buy some cherimoyas. They didn’t know what they were, any more than I did, but they were very eager to try them. I was dubious, but I did a Google search from the store and saw that Mark Twain had called the cherimoya “the most delicious fruit known to men.” It wasn’t a quote I was familiar with–and I’ve read all of his major works, most of his minor works, his letters, and a couple of biographies–but I figured any fruit that would try to market itself with Mark Twain couldn’t be all bad. So I bought two.
Here’s one of them.
And here it is cut in half.
We all tasted it–difficult, because you have to be very careful: the seeds are deadly poisonous (but you have to take them in your mouth and suck the meat of the fruit off them, since the fruit is pretty much eighty percent seeds and all the meat sticks to the seeds), and if you’re injected with extract from the skin you’ll be irreverisbly paralyzed. It was tasty enough, but hardly enough to justify possible poisoning or paralysis, whatever Mark Twain may have said.
Being Mark Twain, I’m reasonably sure his quote was an arch bit of sarcasm.
Remember, he’s also the one who said, “There are lie, damned lies, and cherimoyas.”
We never finished the first one, and the second eventually found its way into the trash.
Thus endeth the saga of the cherimoya.
The skies were gray, but the temperatures were still passably above our swimming minimum.
And the hammock doesn’t care how warm it is.
And of course, there’s no shame in taking a little indoor time now and then.
(Shout out to Aunt Deb for turning us onto Life 360, by the way. It’s fun to stalk each other when we’re abroad, and it’s nice not to have to write phone numbers onto the girls’ hands with marker when we’re out and about in a crowd. Molli doesn’t have it on her phone, but the mere threat of our installing it has made her a much more reliable texter and phoner.)
Despite the uneven weather of our first couple of days, we kept telling one another that “if this is the worst weather we get while we’re down here, it’s really not that bad!”
During one sunny moment I got this picture, which I think matches pretty well with the angle from which Jørgen did his painting of the house.
Maddie recently picked up the game of solitaire, and spent plenty of time during the trip playing it.
There were some problems with the car…
..which weren’t so much mechanical as digital: some of the sensors weren’t working properly, so one rainy day we dropped the car at the dealership for service since we wanted to visit the big Faro mall across the street anyway.
So how’s this for a picture of our sunny paradise vacation?
Once again, for reasons beyond male comprehension, the girls were drawn to the lovely winter-wear for sale in what is literally the warmest part of continental Europe.
And it was actually a pretty nice mall (nice enough that I only thought about suicide, without ever actually fantasizing about it).
The girls had a great time shopping, and while Trine got some healthy organic food and I got a nice local beef plate from the food court, Molli and Maddie opted for an authentically Portuguese lunch from KFC.
After a few hours had gone by I walked back to the dealership alone to let the girls continue their shopping. This was ostensibly so I could apply some pressure by standing at the desk of the dealership and asking how much longer it was going to be at five-minute intervals, but was really just a convenient excuse to get me out of the mall.
I did get this nice picture of it as I crossed the pedestrian bridge over the main road on my way back to the dealership.
Back at the house that afternoon, Trine and I toured the grounds.
The almonds were ready for picking–I’d never seen whole almonds ready to be plucked like this.
The olives, on the other hand, seemed to need a little more time.
And the grape vines were barren — but maybe because they’d already been harvested.
The weather was still suboptimal, so we began the next day with a trip to one of the beach towns (I forget which) not far from us. We figured we’d just kind of explore.
The beaches were deserted, but our viking girls were undaunted.
Moments after those pictures were taken, a particularly big wave came and nearly swept Maddie’s flip-flops away: she went running into the water after them, eliciting screams of horror from her mother and myself.
“Stop, stop, stop!” we shouted with parental panic.
Another wave came crashing around her feet, she lost her balance and fell, then got up (flip flops in hand) and came running toward us in tears (from the double whammy of having been slam-dunked by the sea and the terrified and probably terrifying screams of her parents), her shorts and the bottom of her shirt soaked through.
We dried her off at the car, wrapped her in a towel, and spent the next forty-five minutes or so wandering through the town’s many little tourist shops looking for fresh, dry clothing for her. As soon as we had it we left that town behind and never returned.
Instead, we followed the signs to the Vilamoura Marina, because that sounded more promising. At the same time, the weather started to turn for the better.
We all fell in love with the place.
It’s basically just a big harbor with a pedestrian strip wrapped around it, and dozens of cafés and restaurants and bars and ice-cream parlors and kitschy little tourist shops fronting the strip.
But it was the first feeling of heat we’d felt on the trip: the sun was glorious, and our Nordic skin reveled in the loving warmth of its rays.
One of the most peculiar shops along the marina was the “O Wonderful World of Portuguese Sardines” shop, which only sold one item: sardines in tins. And the tins came in only one size. Their angle was that you could buy a tin emblazoned with any year all the way back to the early 20th century.
I’m not joking. That was it. You’ll see.
You can’t possibly read it now that the photo is so reduced for the blog, but the name of the hotel in the distance is simply “Tivoli.”
We didn’t know it at the time, but we’d end up having ice-cream at this particular place on our last visit to the marina: because our first experience was so pleasant (especially in contrast to the crappy little town we’d been that morning) that we ended up going there for ice-cream each of the last three days of our visit.
The house even seems to take on a different hue in the heat: in the cooler, gray days of our arrival it had seemed sort of a canary yellow, but in the bright hot sun in a blue sky, it looked almost golden.
At Maria’s recommendation, we went out to dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Almencil. It was a fantastic dinner, and the closest thing to American-style Chinese food I’ve had in Europe.
Back at the house that night, we passed the time with Jenga.
And when we got tired of playing the game, we challenged each other to see who could build the tallest tower. (Molli won with an eleven-storey structure.)
It wasn’t actually Jenga, but a knock-off version Gert had bought in China.
The Chinese version is interesting. It gives you 51 wood “pieaes” on one side of the box…
…and 48 on the other.
But we shouldn’t be so quick to blame it on the Chinese… it was, after all, made not in China but Chian.
(I have every confidence there are American products with equally bewildering packaging in the great nation of Chian.)
Molli isn’t much into solitaire, but has real promise building card houses.
The next day promised to be gray yet again, but at least without any threat of rain.
So we decided it would be the day for our trip into downtown Faro, where we’d all been looking forward to a repeat of the great lunch we’d had last year. Remember, it wasn’t cold, or even cool, just unsunny and gray.
We arrived in the very early afternoon and it was a very different Faro than we were used to.
We went straight for lunch.
Trine and I expressed great joy at the taste of our beers; this piqued Maddie’s curiosity and she asked for a sip. Her reaction was classic and may in fact be my favorite picture from the trip.
That’s one for the ages!
And again, lunch was spectacular.
Afterwards we strolled toward the Fair.
I paid a little more attention this year, and discovered that the carnival we’d accidentally wandered into last year was actually an annual fair that lasts only one week.
It’s the St. Iria Fair, and it’s only a coincidence that it’s been underway during our autumn visits of last year and this.
It’s one of the oldest regular fairs in Portugal; a document from 1596 actually mentions it as a regular thing, and it’s been regular ever since. And we had a fairly good time there last year, especially on the bumper cars, so we figured we’d repeat it this year.
So, like last year, we began with a stroll through the flea market.
…where we found some interesting footwear:
Didn’t catch the blooper? Here’s a close-up — I’ll say no more about it.
The big Nutella stand was still there, still offering their five-gallon jars…
And the rides were just as colorful, exciting, and closed as when we’d first stumbled across the fair a year previously.
There was one big difference this year, though — maybe you can spot it in the picture below.
I’ll zoom in a little:
Hard to tell even then, I guess, but it was a huge, violent brawl between two factions of carnies.
The fair was supposed to have officially opened by now, but none of the rides were operating yet, so in the interests of not getting caught up in the Great Algarve Carny Riot of 2017 we decided to wander back into town for some ice cream and maybe come down once things had settled down and the rides had opened.
We saw police rushing toward the fair as we walked briskly away from it, so we applauded ourselves for our good judgment.
And yet again we ran into our old friend the eye doctor…
Meanwhile, the weather briefly improved:
…which made our ice-cream break all the sweeter.
Once enough time had passed, we made our way back to the fair. The rides still hadn’t opened, however–presumably the police action had delayed things a little–so we just got some candy floss and churros and left.
So shocking, always, to see how dilapidated so much of this pretty little seaside city is.
We made it back to the house in time for some late afternoon sunshine and warmth.
…and the warmth was enough that we were able to enjoy an after-dinner swim.
The weather was clearly turning our way at this point, so the next day we returned to Slide & Splash.
We spent many hours there, and did pretty much every single slide there, but with the phones locked up in the changing room locker all the time, there are no pictures except for those establishing shots.
I did manage to persuade Molli to pose for this picture: those are real parrots, and the background is not a backdrop. But it sure looks staged! (Park employees are standing there with the parrots and take your picture, then you can buy the photo on the way out. Maddie was a little too scared of the birds, and Trine was in too much of a hurry, which is why they’re not included — but when Maddie saw this picture back at home in Værløse she didn’t remember being nervous about the birds and was very sad not to have a picture like this of herself, so we must never speak of it again.)
On the way home (Slide & Splash is about 45 minutes west of Almencil), Trine and I decided we wanted to see Albufeira. The girls just wanted to go home and have ice cream, but we insisted. They protested and we doubled down.
This “Photo Map” from my iPhone gives a pretty good sense on how Albufeira lies about halfway between Slide & Splash (far left) and Casa de Morfar (which would be “under” the photo marked with a “106” legend).
We wound our way down off the highway into the city, following the signs for the marina based on our happy experience with Vilamoura, which we’d stumbled across by means of the same kind of inspired meandering. That was a mistake, beacause we just ended up by a narrow little marina flanked by some apartment buildings and nothing of any real interest. The girls were groaning with misery.
Fortunately we got lost on the roads the wound up and down the steep hillsides, until finally I pulled over, parked, and checked the area on my phone. It looked like we were close to the city center, so we decided to get out of the car and take a walk. The girls were miserable, but only until we found ourselves, just 100 meters later, in the middle of a really beautiful little town where we promised they could have ice cream.
We had wandered through a few narrow little streets and I assumed we would just wander through more and more of them right up until we hit the beach, when suddenly a vast, gleaming square opened up before us. It was like being the bottom of a broad bowl, surrounded on all sides by cliffs and the buildings built into them.
Looking at the map I could see we were very close to the beach, but we couldn’t figure out how to get to the beach. We could smell the sea, but we seemed to be walled in from it.
I’ll use the iPhone photo map again to show our conundrum: you can see the damn ocean, but there’s no road leading to it!
We were indeed walled out from it — until we found this tunnel.
I should mention, since it seems like the kind of detail the girls will remember forever, that sitting in the middle of the tunnel was a shrunken little woman with a withered walnut face, crooning with the most terrible singing voice you ever heard, plunking at a guitar with no rhythm or apparent purpose. (“Remember that time in Portugal in that tunnel and there was that weird old lady singing so badly?” “Of course I remember, honey, it’s in the blog…”)
And emerging from the tunnel:
So we finished our ice creams on that terrace, then turned back around through the Tunnel of the Singing Madwoman.
And that was it for Albufeira. I don’t think the pictures do it justice: it was like a Portuguese version of Limona, the little Italian town we stayed at on Lake Garda, all those many years ago.
The weather had really turned by this point, so we were able to eat outside. In moving the terrace furniture around for dinner preparations, I came across this little fellow:
It was finally truly southern weather.
The terrace guest wasn’t offended by our dining in his presence; he simply moved higher up the wall.
Even on the warmest days of our visit, though, it did get cooler after the sun had been down for a while, so we weren’t done with Jenga and card houses and solitaire.
By unanimous agreement, we’d decided that since the forecast for the next day was for basically flawless weather — the nicest our family would experience all year (apart from one or two days in the States and possibly the first day or two of school back in Denmark) we decided we wouldn’t do anything. We’d lounge around the pool all day, and our big event of the day would be an afternoon trip for ice-cream.
It was a great day.
I’d been trying to talk Trine into giving the Kindle a try for a long time. I hadn’t really thought through the implications of what would happen if she tried it and liked it.
Not a great shot of me, but one of only three or four from the whole trip.
I love the next picture of Trine with Flash because Trine looks just like the muppet girl in the muppet band (Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, and the blondes name was Janice, as it turns out).
Strangely enough, the picture below reminds me of the living room view from my apartment on Kingsley Avenue, in LA, circa 1989-90. Except in LA, the gray smudge on the horizon would have been the fog over the basin instead of an ocean.
For the rest of the visit we were able to dine outside every evening. Our little reptilian friend had apparently had enough of our company: he simply disappeared. (Or was devoured by Flash.)
In fact, that day of doing nothing had been so wonderful that we decided to repeat it the next day.
We made afternoon ventures to Vilamour for ice-cream just to break up the monotony–although we never felt especially monotonized.
There was plenty of night swimming in the nicer weather.
Maybe that’s what worked up Maddie’s appetite to the point that she needed a little roll with her jam.
It’s a week before Halloween, and I’m getting sunburned in 90-degree heat under a cloudless sky while I bob around a warm swimming pool with a beer in my hand. How’m I feelin’?
And how’s Trine doing?
And that was the third day we just lounged around enjoyed ourselves in the gorgeous weather.
Tragically, it was also our last full day in Portugal, and so our last little afternoon trip to Vilamoura.
As I foretold you: ice cream at the little spot I’d taken a picture of on our first visit to Vilamoura:
We couldn’t help looking in at one of the little real estate offices along the marina. We found this house:
It’s something like 450 square feet of home on 10,000 square meters of property. It has ever amenity you can think of, including its own putting green. And its asking price was just a wee bit more than the market value of our own home in Denmark. The girls were ready to move until we reminded them that moving to Portugal would mean leaving all their friends — and learn Portuguese.
That was the end of that.
Molli Malou, animal whisperer that she’s always been, worked very patiently all week to get close to Lassie, the poor sweet dog who was so abused by its original owner that it’s terrified of all human beings. Her patience and persistence earned Lassie’s trust.
Very sadly, Lassie got sick shortly after our visit and is no more. Rest in peace, sweet Lassie.
I used the panorama function to get this picture of the house that evening:
And finally it was our last Portuguese sunset.
And our last evening of just enjoying some drinks in the warm evening air.
Wednesday morning and it was time to head to the airport.
Bye-bye, Faro!
Shout out to the Pyrenees!
And hello Amsterdam!
Once again, a three-hour layover at Schiphol airport. . .
And we’re on our way home!
And what do I find on my desk at work my first day back?
(My boss Louise had been in San Francisco while we’d been in Portugal. She’d asked weeks earlier if we needed anything from the states — I’d told her no, we’d just been to the states and were all loaded up, but then lamented the fact that we had forgotten Stove Top stuffing.)
And next thing you know, — and I realize this is off topic — next thing you know, Maddie is laying out her Halloween costume:
She insisted her costume was “a Goth.” (And on Halloween she seemed to get the make-up just right, but, unbelievably, I have no pictures of her in her costume. And Molli Malou didn’t even dress up or Trick or Treat this year. Sigh.)
That was that: Efterårsferie 2017.
But one last photo, which I don’t know where to place but seems worthy of inclusion in the permanent record: another family tree pic. I no longer even remember who posted it in Family Group, but I was glad to see it: my Aunt Beth and Gene and all my Bland cousins’ kids. (I can’t name them all so I won’t name any of them, so that I don’t insult the ones whose names I cannot summon unaided. Also I think there’s one missing?)
Now we’re staring down the barrel of a loaded holiday season: we’re about to launch into the wild and woolly stretch of Thanksgiving, Maddie’s birthday (she’s counting that down for us daily), first Christmas Advent, and then Christmas hygge every night until Christmas Eve. And it’s already getting dusky around 16:30 in the afternoon, and remaining dark until close to 8:00 in the morning.
But what warm memories to carry us through into the New Year and the lengthening days that will bring us to spring!
