The blur that was the 2024 holiday season

Since the last update we’ve had a lot of extra-curricular activities. We’ve had an expat Thanksgiving, a visit from Jill’s parents, made our first pilgrimage back to United States to see family and friends. And, we’ve hosted Ella for two weeks, which I will recount in an upcoming post. Because I’ve let so much time pass since the last post, I’ve had to refer back to pictures to remember all of the stuff we’ve done.

Starting with Thanksgiving… Our friends Jane and Steve, who live in Nazaré, hosted seventeen people for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner with turkey and dressing. Kudos to Jane and Steve. Seventeen people is a very big crew to host, let alone to cook for. Jane had to negotiate access to her next door neighbor’s oven to accommodate the volume of food that needed to be heated up.

Because we are all expats and missing home to some degree there was a good familial feel to it. The notable differences from our traditional Thanksgiving were not being with actual family and, because of the six-hour time difference, not getting to watch the Cowboys lose while eating pie.

The week after Thanksgiving, we picked Jill’s parents up at the Lisboa airport.

We’ve now made enough trips to LIS that it feels like we have the ingress, parking, and egress pretty well dialed in. That’s not to say it’s not still stressful, but it’s just normal airport stress – not completely overwhelming like it was in the beginning. But every time we go to the airport it seems like there’s something different to contend with. For example, when we picked up Jill’s parents the police were seemingly-randomly waving cars exiting the airport over to the shoulder for some sort of check. It could have been they were checking drivers licenses, or checking ride-sharing services, or doing random breathalyzer checks. Fortunately, they waved over the car in front of us and we skated through unscathed – so we don’t know what they were looking for. It may be just me, but even though we are following all of the rules we are aware of that kind of situation makes my heart rate go up and my palms get sweaty.

We had a great week with Jill’s parents. We struck a balance between lots of day trips to see the normal sights we take our guests to see, visiting Christmas markets, and Jill and her mom decorating the new house.

On their last day in Portugal we took the Palmers to Lisboa. We parked at the Meliã hotel to get them checked in.

Then we took a taxi into town to wander around the Baixa district.

There were Christmas markets in full swing at Praça da Figuera and Praça do Rossio which gave Nana one last Santa fix before their flight home.

After Nana had wrung all of the Christmas out that Lisboa had on offer, we took a taxi back to the Meliã. We said our “temporary” goodbyes and headed back to SMP. I say temporary because we were already slated to see Jill’s parents twice more in two different locations over the ensuing two weeks.

A few days later it was time to take Woody and Bulleit to the pet hotel for their extended stay during our trip stateside. It’s always hard to leave them, especially for a long trip, but the nice folks at Espaço Verde do their best to make sure we know that W&B are well cared for.

If we go to Lisboa the night before we fly, we take the bus from SMP and stay at the Meliã. But we’ve also found a driver, named Carlos, that we really like who picks us up at our house and delivers us directly to LIS. On travel day Carlos picked us up at our gate at 6AM for our 9:40AM flight and we were at the TAP Air Portugal checkin desk by 7:30AM.

A note on TAP: TAP is the national (as in nationalized) carrier of Portugal and has nonstops from LIS to a whole bunch of interesting places. Portugal is soliciting bids for a major airline partner to become a majority owner of TAP. Jill and I previously flew on TAP when we met Mia and Rich in London and really liked them.

When we were booking this trip we found out that TAP has nonstop flights between LIS and SFO, which are super convenient for us visiting California. That nonstop flight allowed us to plan our trip to the US to start on the west coast so we could work our way continually east over the course of the trip and then fly back to Portugal on our now-customary United flight from Newark.

The long-haul TAP flight was a great experience and we will have no hesitation flying TAP to any destination where they fly. We landed at SFO at about 2PM local time and my parents met us at baggage claim and we were off the races on our three-day visit to California.

There were lots of people we wanted to see on our trip, but none was a higher priority for us than Aunt Betty (technically Rich’s GREAT Aunt Betty). We absolutely adore her, as does the entire family. Betty is 103 years young as of this writing, sharp as a tack, gracious, generous to a fault, and an absolute joy to be around. I think it is safe to say that we all hope to grow up to be Betty.

The first formal order of business after landing was our traditional dinner with Betty at Tai Pan in Palo Alto. As tradition holds, Rich does the ordering for the table and all we have to do is show up and eat. For the record, that’s my kind of dinner.

At dinner, Betty distributed Christmas cards to all in attendance. Our card contained cash designated for gaming in Las Vegas – more on that shortly – and See’s Candy gift cards. What can I say? Betty gets us.

The next day was more Betty Time with group pedicures (Thank you Non!) and a nice lunch.

Jill and I finished our pedicures a little before everyone else and used that time to walk to the local Chase branch… In a long-running comedy of errors, the IRS failed to apply an overpayment from a prior year to our taxes. Then in all of the back and forth with the IRS to get it sorted out they still chose to send us a refund check instead of carrying the overpayment forward to the next tax year as requested. Jill’s dad brought that paper check from the US to Portugal when they visited us. I wasn’t able to deposit it on the Chase mobile app so we schlepped it back to the US with us and walked into a Chase branch to deposit it. Best I can tell, that check traveled about ten thousand miles before it got deposited several months after it was issued.

The timing also worked out for us to attend Carter’s 25th birthday omakase fiesta at Robin with Mia, Rich, and Carter. For those of you from Austin, Robin is Menlo Park’s answer to Uchiko.

After three days of fun with my parents, the Moshers, and Betty – and in possession of some very thoughtful and Portugal-appropriate Christmas presents – Jill and I decamped for Las Vegas for two nights at Bellagio where we would meet back up with Jill’s parents to hit all of our favorite experiences, including Garth Brooks at Caesar’s the following night.

Everyone’s flights were largely on time and we had no trouble meeting up with Team Palmer at the appointed time in the Bellagio lobby. We all dropped our bags in our rooms and immediately trooped to Club Prive for the requisite Espresso Martinis.

We went to the Michael Jackson One show at Mandalay Bay the first night. It’s the third time we’ve seen it and it never disappoints.

The next morning, we did our traditional breakfast at Sadelle’s and I got my Eggs Benedict, everything bagel, and coffee cocktail. Then we ate at Mon Ami Gabi at Paris for lunch so Jill could get her French Onion Soup.

Between meals and shows, I found 20 minutes to play some video poker with the money Betty had given us for that express purpose. And look what happened!

Before the Garth show we hit Yellowtail and had another spectacular meal.

Then we were off to see Garth!

And just like that it was time to leave Las Vegas and head for Dallas.

Because we were flying Southwest from Las Vegas and the Palmers were flying American we needed a pickup from Love Field in Dallas to take us to Chez Palmer in Frisco. Steph and Brad assigned Mason to be our chauffeur for the afternoon. Mason gets five stars!

We spent two nights in Frisco catching up with the extended Palmer/Bierman clan. Then Jill and I parted ways for a couple of days. On Christmas Day I picked up my mom and we had a nice drive to the ranch in Junction where I spent a few days communing with nature in my happy place. And, the day after Christmas Jill flew from Dallas to Austin and started catching up with friends while I was doing my part to keep the world safe from feral hogs.

My good friend John met me at the ranch and we did all the ranch things for a couple of days. Then I rode with John back to Austin with the traditional homeward stop at Whataburger Burnet. Whataburger craving satisfied, John dropped me at the Loren Hotel to reunite me with my betrothed. I’ll admit was a little weird to be in Austin and not staying in our own house.

What did we do on my first night back in Austin in 8 months? We went to the Chuy’s mothership on Barton Springs for Tex-Mex and Mexican Martinis!

We also managed to squeeze in Eldorado Cafe with our friends Greg and Nancy.

The next night our friend Amy orchestrated a get together of a big chunk of our Austin friend circle at her house so that we could see as many of them as possible on our short visit, plus there was a delicious spread laid out with Franklin’s BBQ!

We spent our last full day in Austin with Ella, who had the day off of work. It was a beautiful day so we put on our shorts and walked around Town Lake (Sorry Lady Bird, it will always be Town Lake to me).

Ella also joined us for a last minute Costco run (you know my position on Costco-sized bottles of Ibuprofen vs Portugal’s 8 count blister packs), and wrapped up with dinner at the food trailer park on BartonSprings.

The next morning it was time to come home to Woody and Bulleit. We dropped the rental car at AUS and started our homeward journey with a flight to Newark.

Carlos was waiting for us when we walked out of LIS with our bags and he whisked us home. We dropped our bags, jumped in the car and went to pick up the boys, who wasted no time curling up on the couch next to Jill.

The final scorecard for our first trip back stateside since arriving in Portugal:

• Elapsed time from LIS-SFO departure to EWR-LIS return: 12 days 22 hours 30 minutes
• Quality family time with (in order from West to East): Aunt Betty, Praisners, Moshers, Palmers, Biermans, my mom, Ella
• Catching up with too many friends to list
• Five total locations: California, Las Vegas, DFW, Austin, and the ranch
• Eating at all the places: Tai Pan, Robin, Spago, Sadelle’s, Mon Ami Gabi, Yellowtail, Whataburger, Chuys, and Eldorado Cafe (plus Franklins catered in 🙂
• Signature cocktails consumed: Espresso Martinis at Club Prive, Coffee Cocktails at Sadelle’s, Sunset at Yellowtail, the classic Mexican Martini at Chuy’s
• Garth Brooks + Betty’s Christmas Cash Jackpot
• Quality ranch time with John
• Flight segments: LIS-SFO, OAK-LAS,LAS-DAL,DAL-AUS,AUS-EWR,EWR-LIS

We knew our itinerary was aspirational, but Jilly P plans things – that’s her superpower. I contend that we successfully crammed about 8 pounds of holiday adventure into a 5-pound-sack.

From Thanksgiving dinner at Jane and Steve’s to watching the SMP’s spectacular firework display at the stroke of midnight on the New Year we had one heck of a holiday season. It’ll be hard to top it this year, but we’re open to ideas.

Adventure is out there!