Burn the Boats

The morning of Monday April 22nd, Jill headed to AUS with all of our luggage, while I waited for Kevin from PetRelocation to pick the boys up.

While I was waiting for Kevin, our friend and neighbor Monica came down to keep me and the boys company. Jill had arranged for Monica to be the boys’ backup human just in case time got tight with Kevin and I had to head for the airport in a hurry.

Kevin showed up right on time and took possession of the boys and I headed for the airport in the rental car.

The prime directive for me and Jill was to get to Portugal and get sufficiently sorted so that we could be ready for Woody and Bulleit’s arrival, which was scheduled about 14 hours after our arrival. For lots of good reasons, the boys route was Austin to Frankfurt to Lisboa on Lufthansa, while we were going Austin to Dulles to Lisboa via United.

And just like that it was time for Jill and I to take off!

After an easy transit through Dulles, Jill and I had an on-time arrival in Lisboa at 10:30AM on Tuesday April 23rd. Upon landing we both switched on our phones, set our Portuguese numbers to primary (our US numbers still work) and scanned email and text for updates on Woody and Bulleit. We quickly got photo confirmation that they’d arrived safely in Frankfurt none the worse for the wear.

Jill and I made our way through the immigration line and proudly presented our shiny new visas for their inaugural stamp. The person manning the immigration booth did not seem to understand the import of the situation. He just flipped to an open page on our passport, applied the entry stamp, and waved us through.

Undeterred, we strode giddily toward the baggage claim to retrieve our 12 pieces of checked luggage. We were met at baggage claim by the two porters that Jill had arranged. The porters had already started pro-actively identifying our luggage (by our last name on the baggage tags) and loading it onto trolleys before Jill and I even got to the baggage carousel. Once Jill arrived at the carousel she identified the remainder of our bags and by the time I arrived from my detour to the gentlemen’s lounge the luggage trolleys were loaded and we were ready to head for the exit.

When we reached the Portuguese Customs checkpoint with what was well in excess of tourist-level luggage we were stopped briefly. The customs agent asked what was in one of our plastic bins and Jill astutely blurted out “Christmas ornaments!” We then proceeded to have a brief exchange with the customs agent and he ultimately waved us through without any further inspection. Jill’s intention in declaring “Christmas ornaments!” (which she knew was NOT what was in that particular container) was the last thing she could imagine a customs agent wanting to sift through was Christmas ornaments. The porter later advised her that the customs agents are only thorough when the boss is watching and apparently we’d hit a window when the boss was on a smoke break. We’ll never know whether it was the specter of looking through Christmas ornaments or the boss being gone, but we are not ones to look a gift horse in the mouth and we moved smartly out of the customs area and into the arrivals hall. It is worth noting that Jill was also fully prepared to go to the distance with customs. She had an approved detailed baggage allowance document stamped by the Portuguese embassy in DC for all the stuff we were bringing that could otherwise have triggered an import duty – along with an actual packing list of what was in each bag.

When we entered the arrivals hall we quickly found Carlos, our driver. I’ll admit that I was skeptical that Carlos was going to have a vehicle that would fit all of our luggage, but Carlos was a pro. Carlos escorted us to the loading area of the parking structure and told us to sit tight while he fetched his van. Two minutes later Carlos pulled up in his van and a minute after that all of our baggage was stowed and we were off!

Jill had arranged for Carlos to ferry me to the Santogal car dealership in Abrunheira, 30 minutes away, to pick up our nearly-new Renault Austral. Over the course of the 30 minute drive we chatted with Carlos about how we’d come to the conclusion that Portugal was right for us and how excited we are to be embarking on this adventure. As with 100% of the Portuguese people we’ve previously shared our plan with, Carlos was full of encouragement. He gave us his perspective on the good and the bad of Portugal. The only knock he came up with was that he’s not a fan of the private healthcare system that exists alongside the public one. Carlos understood that, as a condition to apply for residency, we are REQUIRED to have private health insurance while we wait to become eligible for the public system – meaning he wasn’t pointing the criticism at us. We were jet-lagged so I may not have heard it right, but my take-away of his viewpoint was in the case of emergency or trauma EVERYONE uses the public system – because the private system is geared toward elective care – but in less urgent situations the private system lets people with money jump the line while the general public may wait months or years for the same care.

We pulled up at Santogal and I asked Carlos to wait with Jill while I confirmed that I was in the right place and that the car was ready for pickup. My new friend Luis at Santogal was indeed ready for me so I gave Jill and Carlos the thumbs up and they set off for SMP.

Luis walked me through finalizing the car purchase. Since I’d already sent him my proof of insurance all that was left was him watching me sign the bill of purchase. So far our experience in Portugal is that they don’t want you to show up with a signed document. They want you to show up with a document that’s ready-to-sign so that they can watch you sign.

The Renault Austral is everything I’d hope it would be. Luis walked me through getting Apple CarPlay set up so that the Waze lady would be able to guide me to our new home. Luis even went with me to put gas in the car – he explained that new cars are typically delivered with a full tank of gas, but used cars are almost always delivered with nearly empty tanks as ours was. And when I mentioned that getting WeatherTech mats is always the first thing I do in the US when coming into possession of a new-to-me vehicle, Luis sent me the link where I would find what I was looking for. I’ll be recommending Luis to anyone I come across who needs a car.

Armed with the confidence that only Waze can give you in a foreign land, I set out to catch up with Jill. My only anxiety was that I didn’t have a Via Verde toll tag. Via Verde is Portugal’s primary mobility authority, they do motorway tolls, parking payments, and even ferry tickets. We’d read that you can go through the free-flowing Via Verde transponder lanes even if you don’t have a toll tag and the system would log your license plate and after a few days the tolls for your license plate would appear on a website, where you can initiate payment for the accumulated tolls. So I avoided the toll booths and stuck to the Via Verde transponder lanes. Spoiler alert: It all works exactly as advertised!

By the time I got to our new digs in SMP, Jill had already bid Carlos farewell and made a dent in unpacking the essentials. The packing list Jill had prepared for Customs turned out to be a fantastic blueprint for finding the essentials in our stupefied state.

When I arrived Jill had a funny story about her arrival at the house… We’d left the primary key in a bowl by the front door and put the spare key in a lockbox before we left on our last visit – so that we could let ourselves in with the spare key when we arrived this time. When Jill opened up the lockbox: No key. So, we’ve flown across the Atlantic. The dogs are in Frankfurt getting ready board a flight to Lisbon. And Jill can’t get into the house!

Fortunately, Jill is a creative problem solver. There’s a mother-in-law suite where the owner stays when they are visiting that has a shared door between the units. There’s a separate lockbox for that unit and Jill managed to find the code for that lockbox somewhere in her notes. She managed to go in through the mother-in-law suite and open the door to our unit from the inside, whereupon Carlos deposited all of the bags. We now know that the owner has had a handy man doing some repairs and apparently he took the key out and forgot to put it back. We are still trying to track down that key.

That whole process took a little time so I ended up arriving about 15 minutes after Carlos’ departure.

We spent a few more minutes unpacking and then hopped in the Austral and headed out to pick up the boy’s food at Avipets, which Ana Cristina, the owner had special ordered for our arrival. But Avipets was still closed for siesta so we decided to go get lunch and stop by Intermarché while we waited for Avipets to re-open.

We had no trouble finding a place to park on the marginal (the street that fronts the beach) and walked to Cervejeria Bohemia (this is the cafe where we first fell in love with SMP) where we trotted out the only Portuguese we could muster in foggy state when ordering lunch… “Queremos duas tostas mistas, uma batatas fritas, duas aguas com gas, e dois cappuccinos, faz favor.” We got an affirmative nod from the waiter and a few minutes later we were enjoying ham and cheese toasties and sharing an order of French fries with a cappuccino chaser.

Fortified with my favorite sandwich and caffeine we made the short drive to Intermarché, where we went aisle to aisle and threw what seemed like essentials into the cart based on the picture on the packaging. The good news is that it was very easy to pick cheese and charcuterie – and we loaded up on those.

The idea was to lay in enough supplies so that we could hunker down with the boys for a couple of days once they arrived.

By the time we checked out of Intermarché, Avipets was open and we popped in to purchase our dog food, dog bowls, etc.

With the boys about to get on to their Frankfurt flight to Lisboa and slated to clear customs in Lisboa at 2AM that morning, we climbed into bed for a 3 hour nap so that we’d be rested for the roundtrip to the airport to pick them up.

Starting about 9PM local time we started getting text updates from Lufthansa and PetRelocation personnel letting us know where the boys were in the process. Even though everything was going smoothly, Jill and I were both exhausted and anxious to have the pack back together.

They landed right on schedule and we’d been forewarned that getting them through customs would take 3-4 hours. So, we posted up on the couch watching episodes of Monk on Netflix while we waited for the 2 hour warning, which came at 12:30AM.

We hit the road immediately for the hour and 10 minute drive to the LIS air cargo facility which is on the other side of the airport from the passenger terminal. About 45 minutes into the drive, Gel, our PetRelocation agent in Portugal, messaged Jill and said the boys were ready for pickup – AND WE WERE STILL 30 MINUTES OUT! I may have done some speeding on Lisboa’s empty roads over that last bit.

We pulled into the freight terminal parking lot and the first thing we saw were W&B’s blue and orange crates with the PetRelocation agent standing next to them. This is funny now, but at the time it was extremely stressful… We approached their crates with leashes and collars in hand only to find that the Frankfurt team had zip-tied the boys’ crates shut – this was clearly done for their safety so that there was no way the doors would open accidentally in transit.

We saw the boys and they saw us and we all got excited and then we all freaked out because there was no way to open the doors to their kennels. In every car I’ve ever owned I keep a pocket knife or a multi-tool in the console for exactly such an occasion. Sadly, the multi-tool I’d brought for the Austral had not been unpacked yet. What followed was a full 10 minutes of us looking at the boys and them looking at us and no one being able to find anything to cut zip ties with. It was AGONIZING for all of us. Finally, a nice man from the cargo operation managed to get the gates open…

I had it all planned out to take a video of Jill’s reunion with W&B, but I got so excited myself that this is all I got…

We were finally all happily reunited and made it home to SMP at about 3:30AM local time.

Elapsed time from Jill leaving our house in Austin to all four of us arriving in SMP: 33 hours

The title of this post is “Burn the Boats” for a reason…

Upon reaching the New World, Hernán Cortés famously burned the boats so that his 600 men would understand that the only way out was through and would be fully committed to making their way in their new environs. While eschewing the colonial overtones of the phrase, I mean to imply that we are full-on committed to this adventure. And we did indeed donate W&B’s crates to the local humane society in Lisbon, so in that sense we did indeed burn the boats.

One last thing:

Adventure is out there!