In February of 2023, Jill was supposed to take her sister, Stephanie, to Portugal. Stephanie had never been to Europe and Jill had never been to Portugal – so Jill meticulously researched and planned an 8 day trip focused on the southern coast of Portugal, an area known as the Algarve. Unfortunately several weeks before the trip was scheduled to begin Stephanie took a tumble and injured her hand. The trip was on life support while Stephanie got her hand evaluated. Ultimately it became clear that Stephanie required surgery and she had to break the sad news to Jill that she couldn’t go. Before pulling the plug on the trip altogether, Jill asked me if I had any interest in being her first-alternate traveling companion to Portugal. With less than a week’s notice and in the middle of a big work project, I floated the idea at the office and the wonderful team at Boundless encouraged me to jump on the opportunity. And, much to our surprise, the nice people at United were willing to change Stephanie’s ticket into my name and adjust the embarkation point from Dallas to Austin, which resulted in us getting $100 back on the ticket. (Author’s note: In retrospect, this was the first of series of Portugal-related lucky bounces that make us both feel like we are destined to live in Portugal.)
On February 7th we flew to from Austin to Lisbon on United, by way of Newark. Fun fact: Portugal sticks out sneakily far to the west of continental Europe and is on roughly the same latitude as Newark, making the duration of the Newark to Portugal flight a shade under six hours. An unexpected downside to a brief trans-Atlantic flight is that by the time dinner is served and cleared there are only about 3 1/2 hours left for sleeping before you have to start getting sorted for landing.
Upon landing, we breezed groggily through passport control, collected our bags, and headed for the SIXT rental car desk. We’ve all had horrible rental car experiences, this was not one of those. We can’t say enough about the nice people at SIXT- more about that later.
Our first stop was the town of Évora, conquered by the Romans in 57 BC, the Visigoths in 584 AD, and the Moors in 715 AD and reconquered by Portugal in 1165 AD. Evora is just under two hours from Lisbon, which put it right at our maximum radius before jet lag started kicking in full force. The drive from Lisbon to Évora, was our first exposure to how good Portugal’s infrastructure is. Around 2008, when a lot of southern European countries got into debt trouble I didn’t give much thought to what they spent the money on. Our recent firsthand observation is that Portugal, at least, spent much of the money they borrowed on fantastic modern highways and fiber internet (I believe they also modernized their rail infrastructure but we haven’t braved the train system yet). That is made apparent by the fact that you can transit Portugal at 100+ Km/hour on an autobahn-class highway that puts our crappy roads in Texas to shame and then when you reach your destination you are exactly one well-engineered roundabout away from millennia old towns that still have standing Roman walls and temples and 8 foot wide cobbled streets. Fortunately, Jill was already all over that last bit and had already identified a car park outside the walls and tiny, twisty streets of Évora, where, after dropping our bags at our hotel, we stashed our car for the night.
The stop in Évora was intended as a bit of throwaway day to get over the worst of jet lag before proceeding to the Algarve the following morning. We lucked out in that our room was ready early and we took a one hour nap and went in search of lunch. We set out on foot from our hotel with vague directions from the front desk on where we might find a late lunch. We passed a tiny restaurant and poked our head in to see if they were still serving lunch. The proprietor, Miguel, invited us to have a seat and chatted with us for a few minutes. In her research for the trip, Jill had read that one of the cultural norms of Portugal is that every interaction is personal and that exchanging pleasantries an integral part of entering every shop or restaurant. By the time we had finished our initial chat, Miguel told us we didn’t need a menu because he was going to curate a representative regional lunch for us for our first meal in Portugal. It was a pretty magical experience. The lunch was simple and absolutely delicious. Miguel delivered a tray of charcuterie while he went to work on the starter. The starter was shrimp cooked in olive oil and garlic. When we were finished with the starter, Miguel was loitering near the table. After a few minutes he kindly told us that he wouldn’t clear our plates because we hadn’t yet sopped up the remaining olive oil and garlic with the rustic bread. And he was absolutely right to do so because that was one of the highlights of the meal!
The main was a local stew of white grouper and was also amazing.
The funniest moment of lunch came at the outset when we’d finished pleasantries and Jill asked if we should have a bottle of vinho verde. Vinho verde is a slightly effervescent white wine that is unique to Portugal. We were both proud of that bit of local knowledge and thought it would give us street cred with Miguel. Miguel’s response to that query was “Absolutely not! Vinho verde is only drunk in the north of Portugal! Our local wines are far superior.” He did not steer us wrong. This was our first exposure to the fact that EVERY region of Portugal is proud of its local wine and apparently justly so.
We spent the rest of that day wandering around Évora in tourist mode:
Roman temple: ✅
Ossuary: ✅
As darkness descended on Évora we made our way back to the hotel and regrouped from the day over tapas and another glass of the local wine. In another nod from the universe, the seating at the hotel was family-style and we ended up sharing a table with our soon-to-be new friends Martha and Jacques. As it turned out Martha and Jacques are expats who live in Tavira, one of the neat towns in the Algarve that was on our agenda for couple of days later in the trip. And they just happened to be staying overnight in Évora on the way home following a shopping trip to Lisbon. Martha is a retired teacher from Canada and Jacques is from France, they’re both lovely and have lived in Portugal for several years. We had a great conversation about what it was like to actually live in Portugal and agreed to meet up with them for lunch in Tavira when we were on their home court to hear more about their experiences. That conversation with Martha and Jacques was the first conversation we’d had with expats living in Portugal and lit the spark of the idea that it might be something we could do.
One of the things that makes the idea of moving to Portugal possible at all is that we’ve been surprised and relieved at how much English is spoken in Portugal. We assume that is because Portugal has been a tourist destination for the UK and also Canada for decades. Whatever the reason, it’s super handy to have English as a crutch while we are learning Portuguese because Portuguese is HARD!
Jill and Todd in Portugal 