This week we marked one full month in São Martinho do Porto! It was also the first week where we didn’t have at least one significant administrative or logistical dragon to slay.

That’s not to say we didn’t make solid forward progress on getting dialed-in to life in Portugal. We now have 900 index cards, for making flashcards to practice Portuguese, courtesy of Amazon Germany. The index cards were successfully delivered to our back patio while we were out having lunch with friends in Nazaré, putting into question the horror stories we’ve heard about last-mile delivery challenges. We also successfully tested out the CTT locker system, called Locky, by having an air filter delivered there from Amazon Germany (I’ve been a little sneezy, which I attribute to the plethora of blooming things all around us). It’s a pretty slick system. We have the order sent to CTT’s central Locky office in Lisboa with our name and a unique code, which identifies our preferred locker location. CTT routes our package to our preferred locker location and, once the package has been deposited in the locker, sends us the unlock code for our locker. Once they send us the code we have 5 days to retrieve our package from the locker. The only limitation appears to the maximum dimensions of the biggest locker in the bank of lockers which is 64cm X 54cm X 45cm. With these two successful deliveries under our belt, we have already started keeping a running Amazon Germany cart and will be making periodic orders. Free shipping via Amazon Prime is not a thing here, so we will consolidate items in our cart and monitor the shipping cost until we find the sweet spot. On our first two Amazon Germany purchases, shipping has been in the €7.50-€10 range.

Experimenting with Amazon Germany aside, we spent this past week just taking it all in. After a year of planning (by Jill) and a flurry of move-related actions we are finally in a position to make an initial assessment of our new reality.

Spoiler alert: It’s more than a little awesome.

One of the things we are intent on is never taking for granted just how fortunate we are to be on this grand adventure. To that end, we both have fallen into the habit of marveling aloud at the nonstop highlight reel of natural beauty that is Portugal.

Our daily routine starts with a cup of coffee and our daily word games. I do Wordle, Connections, Quordle, and Octordle. Jill does all of those plus Strands. That’s usually enough to get us through a full cup of coffee. And Woody and Bulleit, who are quite serious about their morning walk on the beach, are pretty good at lettings us know if we are behind schedule. We scarf down a cup of pre-walk Greek yogurt (W&B are supportive of this minor delay because they get to lick the yogurt cups clean) and we are off!

Having never lived by the ocean, I’m enjoying learning about tides and waves. This is a great place to learn because we generally have a 2+M tidal swing twice a day. One of my favorite things to do is check the tide charts before we head out on our morning walk around the bay.

I enjoy low tide walks the most because the sand along the water still has enough moisture in it to be firm for walking on and the dogs like to zip around on the firm sand. What I have learned is that when the tide is coming in, the sand has lost enough moisture over the preceding 10-12 hours that it gives way easily underfoot and makes the walk a little more on the trudge side. Low tide walks are also the most fun for W&B because they have more previously submerged beach to snuffle.

Our morning walk all the way around the bay and home clocks in at 5+ miles and about an hour and a half. We are usually back home around 9:15 or so and we cook a proper breakfast, usually eggs, toast, and whatever fruit caught our eye at the market the last time we were there.

Woody and Bulleit are always happy to sunbathe on our patio after their long morning walk. We usually keep the sliding door to the patio open so that they can avail themselves of the warm tile.

We’ve been trying an experiment where we eat as many different types of fruits and vegetables as we can each week, which is fun because the selection at the local fresh market is pretty amazing. We are still eating meat, but thinking of meat as more of a condiment than a focus of the meal. Our local market in SMP is really good, but yesterday we went to the fresh fruit market in Caldas da Rainha, which was next level.

The Caldas market is the deep end of the pool in terms of our comfort zone interacting in Portuguese. At the popular stalls, there’s a lot of commerce being done without any apparent queueing protocol. We finally figured out we just needed to wave insistently until we caught the eye of one of the people manning the stall so they would know we were next up after they finished their current transaction. We do our best to ask for everything in Portuguese. Here is a list (in Portuguese) of all the different types of in-season produce we’ve bought so far from the various markets:

• Cenouras – Carrots
• Cebolas roxas – Red (they call them purple) onions
• Cebolas – Yellow onions
• Alfaces – Lettuce
• Couve roxa – Red cabbage
• Rabinetes – Radishes
• Coelhos – Cilantro
• Limões – Lemons
• Limas – Limes
• Melancia – Watermelon
• Tomates – Tomatoes
• Cerejas – Cherries
• Pêssegos – Peaches
• Ameixas – Plums
• Morengos – Strawberries
• Maças – Apples
• Peras – Pears
• Nectarinas – Nectarines
• Mirtilos – Blueberries
• Pepinos – Cucumbers
• Pimentos – Peppers (decidedly NOT jalapeños, but we are remedying that as fast as we can with the plants on our patio)

A thing we are getting used to here is the way various municipal services work. This week’s example is trash and recycling. There is no home bin collection like we are used to in Austin. Trash and recycling bins are placed at regular intervals along the roads. We are fortunate that ours are right outside the gate of our building and it’s easy to just walk the trash and recycling out when we are headed out with W&B. But, if you’re unlucky you may be 300+ meters from the nearest bins. We see people pulling up to bins in their cars and popping the trunk to offload recycling and trash. It all works out. The bins seem to be emptied by magic. We never see any trash trucks, but they are empty every morning.

While the bay is generally the destination for morning walks, the cliffs to the north of us are where we tend to walk in the afternoons. The variety of flora in the meadows along the cliffs is pretty breathtaking.

A thing we have discovered is that restaurants here sell 375ML bottles of wine, which is half of a 750ML bottle. Genius!

We’ve also been trying to do more restaurant scouting in SMP. There’s a Welsh pub here in SMP, called simply “The Welsh Bar”. We had two reasons to check it out:

1. They supposedly have the best fish and chips in town (Confirmed)
2. We have good friends, Gareth and Jackie, who have Welsh roots and we want them to come visit. We figured we would drop some Welsh sound bites on them from The Welsh Bar to sweeten the pot for a potential visit.

This brings me to my penultimate topic for today:

We decided to move to Portugal as a grand adventure. Additionally, I decided to try and use the move as a compelling event to focus on my overall health and well-being. Lots of exercise, getting plenty of sleep, and eating scads of fresh fruits and vegetables are right down the middle of the plate in that regard. I’m pleased to report that after one month my blood pressure, which has been borderline high even with medication for the last several years is down into the nominal range. If it stays down consistently, I’ll see how I do without blood pressure medication.

Finally, our little town is starting to gear up for summer. The beach vendor shops are popping up and the workmen are busy assembling the beach tents that people rent. Apparently the unofficial kickoff of summer every year in SMP is the Festival of St. Anthony (those of you in Texas may know him as San Antonio). They take St. Anthony seriously in these parts. He rates a 10 day festival.

We have been told to expect bedlam. Stephanie and Clara will be here for the back half of it so I’m sure we will end up in the thick of it at some point.

That’s all the news that’s fit to print from the front lines here in Portugal…

Adventure is out there!

Big news this week!

The first bit of good news is that we both received our Atestados de Residência from the São Martinho do Porto Junta de Fregesia (parish council) on Wednesday. The Atestado is a single page declaration of residence issued by the Mayor of SMP that replaces the lease document that we’ve been presenting at various government documents as proof of accommodation while we are awaiting residency. Armed with our Atestados we can now register with the Serviço Nacional de Saúde (SNS) the Portuguese national healthcare system. As I understand it the SNS funding for a local health precinct is ultimately driven by the number of people officially living the area that are registered with the SNS, with the Atestado being the thing that allows you to register locally. Apparently one of the things you need to do if you move to another parish is get a new Atestdado and re-register for the SNS in that precinct. Jill and I both have private health insurance as required for our residency appointments, but ALL prescriptions are handled by the SNS so getting registered is important for getting any prescriptions filled.

While we were at the Junta office picking up our Atestados, CTT put a notice in our mail box that Jill had a signature-required item from Loja AIMA (the AIMA office) in Viseu that we could pick up at the post office Thursday morning after 11. We showed up at the post office shortly after 11AM on Thursday, took our number, and when our number was called Jill presented her passport to João, who works the desk, as proof of identification and signed for her letter. And, just like that, Jill is officially a card-carrying resident of Portugal!

Practically, that means Jill is now free to come and go from Portugal as she pleases. I, on the other hand, am still limited to one more exit/re-entry into Portugal until my card arrives. ETA on my residence card is the end of August.

From here on out, the only time Jill should have to present her US passport in these parts is when she’s entering or exiting the Schengen region.

More news is that we have our first visitors booked. Jill’s sister Stephanie is returning to Portugal with her daughter Clara for a week in mid-June. That will give us an excuse to go figure out the pickup/dropoff logistics at LIS. We’ve heard that there is a reservation system for airport parking.

We have started a list of the things that we will ask Stephanie to bring us. So far that list consists of:

• Crushed red pepper – Red pepper here tends to be ground into fine powder, with the exception being some piri piri spice blends that seem to consist of more than just crushed pepper.
• A metal citrus squeezer – The ones we’ve found here are plastic and too small for lemons
• A proper pair of silicone-tipped cooking tongs – The tongs here all have scalloped metal tips
• A roll of heavy duty aluminum foil – The aluminum foil here, when you can find it, is about 2 microns thick and doesn’t lend itself to lining cookie sheets
• A large jar of peanut butter

I’m sure we will come up with more things for the list as we get closer.

Portuguese lessons are proceeding apace. We are settling into a good routine with Leonor, who is fantastic, and Jill has made us a 2 inch thick pile of flashcards so we can quiz each other. Technically they aren’t flash “cards”. They are mostly index card-sized pieces of paper – so it would probably be a five inch stack of proper index cards. We have been unable to find index cards in Portugal. To that end, my first order with Amazon Germany was a pack of 900 proper index cards. They are slated to arrive tomorrow before 8PM. We’ve heard Amazon deliveries can be dodgy because they rely on CTT for the last mile. Index cards were a low-dollar/physically small Amazon.de order we could make to start, just to see how delivery to our address works out.

If last-mile delivery turns out to be unreliable, there’s a locker option that we can use where our package gets delivered to a locker and we get a notification when it’s ready to pick up. The downside there is that the nearest locker is in Caldas da Rainha, about 15 minutes away. In a bit of good luck, the lockers are at Agriloja (the local equivalent of Tractor Supply) the garden store in Caldas where we purchased our jalapeño plants. So we at least know where they are.

Another win on the Leonor front is they have a small organic family farm with fresh eggs from happy chickens. We are going to buy our eggs from Leonor and she will bring them to us on lesson days.

We live right along the coast and there’s a pretty reliable wind coming in from offshore which makes the cliffs along our dog walking route a great spot for the paraglider. We see them almost every day. We were walking along the cliffs earlier this week and THIS happened…

Bulleit enjoyed the show.

All of the overlooks where the paragliders fly have little homemade weather vanes to help them judge the wind direction and speed on the clifftops.

We’ve been keeping the boys out of the ocean this until this week just to make sure we could count on them to be good listeners. We gave them the green light this week and it went well. Bulleit is a little more adventurous than Woody, but they’re both getting the hang of it. Now we just need to figure out how to get the sand off of them before we let them back in the house!

That’s all the news that’s fit to print. All in all, not a bad day in the gulag.

Adventure is out there!

Tomorrow marks a fortnight since we made landfall in Portugal. I thought I’d devote this post to all of the settling in activities that we’ve done in the first two weeks.

Under the heading of food, water, and shelter we’ve done a good job of exploring the grocery store options both in SMP and in the next few towns over.

• Here in SMP we have a family run supermarket called Mundo Verde, we try to shop there when we are on foot in town. One downside to Mundo Verde in off peak season is that the family that owns it sometimes goes on vacation and you find out upon arrival that the store is closed until they get back, which they communicate with a note on the door. We haven’t been here during peak tourist season yet, but it is our understanding that everything is open all the time during peak season because that’s when the merchants make the lion’s share of their revenue – so we don’t begrudge them taking time off when they can.
• The local chain supermarket in SMP is an Intermarché, a French chain, which we thought was the bees knees until we experienced a couple of the other options below. Our particular Intermarché is a little bit on the small side compared to the one that we first experienced in Carvoeiro, but it has all of the essentials. Rumor has it that our local Intermarché may be in the process of being phased out in favor of a Continente, which we would welcome.
• There’s a big Continente in Nazaré, about 15 minutes north of us, and another even larger one in Caldas da Rainha about 15 minutes south of us . Continente is a Portuguese grocery chain and we are big fans. Continente is very competitive in terms of overall selection and good prices.
• The other native Portuguese chain option is Pingo Doce. Pingo Doce has a fantastic loyalty program and they happen to have the creamer that Jill likes in her coffee and our new favorite cinnamon biscuits that we have with evening tea.
• We’ve also been to LIDL about 25 minutes away in Alcobaça, a town we visited when we were getting our toll tag (more on that shortly). LIDL, a Germain chain, is solid but has less variety than Continente.
• ALDI is another German chain that has a couple of staples – the primary being good mature English cheddar cheese.
• E. Leclerc is another French chain that has pickled jalapeños and Skippy peanut butter.

It’s early yet, but think it will turn out that there will be a general purpose set of things we buy wherever we happen to be shopping and there will be a set of specific things that we can only get at one of the above outlets (e.g. peanut butter at Leclerc or cheddar cheese at ALDI).

We have also managed to get ourselves set up for Portugal’s system of toll roads. We now have a Via Verde toll tag mounted proudly on our windshield. Via Verde is the primary tolling authority in Portugal (and we’ve been assured that our toll tag will also work in Spain). One thing we now know that probably wouldn’t have changed our vehicle choice is that our Renault Austral is a CLASS 2 vehicle. What makes the Renault Austral a CLASS 2 vehicle you might ask? Well, it has to do with the height of the car directly above the front axle. Any two axle vehicle that is under 1.1 meters high at the front axle is a CLASS 1 vehicle. A two axle vehicle that is taller than 1.1 meters at the front axle is a CLASS 2 vehicle. CLASS 3 vehicles have three axles and CLASS 4 vehicles have more than 3 axles. Because we have decent ground clearance, our car is slightly taller than 1.1 meters above the front wheel, thus CLASS 2. Effectively, CLASS 2 covers everything from mid-sized SUVs like ours all the way up to Sprinter vans. The tolls go up as the class of vehicle increases. CLASS 2 tolls are about 50% higher than CLASS 1 tolls.

In order to get our Via Verde tag, Jill and I made a pilgrimage to Glassdrive in Alcobaça. Glassdrive is an auto glass repair company with locations all over Portugal, which makes it a handy option for toll tag distribution. This was a nice first test for us because the nice office manager at Glassdrive didn’t speak any English. We managed to get through the transaction successfully with a little help from Google Translate and we walked out with our new toll tag and affixed it to the windshield. The toll tags aren’t active until you go to an ATM (all ATMs in Portugal have an option for setting public service payments) and enter the corresponding confirmation number to set up automatic debit for any tolls you accrue.

It was a celebration-worthy accomplishment. So, when we got home, we walked Woody and Bulleit down to city center for a toastie and a cappuccino at a cafe. And after lunch we went to the ATM and successfully activated our Via Verde tag!

The next big item was to present ourselves to AIMA (the Portuguese Ministry of Immigration and Asylum). Our AIMA appointments, scheduled for the morning of April 30, were the driving factor for the timing of our move. By flying on April 22nd, we’d given ourselves a week of lead time to get sorted in advance of our appointments. All we had to do was present ourselves at the appointed times with all of the necessary documents supporting our residency application – including:

1. Our Portuguese tax numbers, called NIFs
2. Proof of accommodation (our lease)
3. Three months of bank statements from our Portuguese bank
4. Proof of private health insurance (required until we receive residency)
5. Our US passports with affixed visas
6. Proof that we’d entered the country since the visas were issued (our boarding passes from our flights)

Piece of cake… Except there was one little complicating factor. Jill’s appointment and my appointment were at the same time in two different towns – towns that were 100 kilometers apart. We opted to turn that particular problem into an expense. We hired a driver named Diana to take Jill to her appointment and perform any necessary translation services at her appointment in Viseu. And I went solo to my appointment in Coimbra, which involved an underground parking garage in city center.

My appointment in Coimbra, the big university town in Portugal, was a little intimidating for no other reason than after parking I walked into the government services building and the queue for the AIMA desk stretched down the length of a hallway and around the corner down the next hallway. That made me think that my appointment time was more of a general suggestion than an actual appointment. Fortunately there was an information desk where you take numbers for the various services on offer and I asked the person manning the desk if I needed to take a number and she said that as long as I had an appointment I just needed to wait until they called my name. I waited about 15 minutes and didn’t hear any names called, which made me think I was in WAY over my head. About then I heard someone call “Christopher Praisner!” I worked my way up to the desk and said, in my shiny new Portuguese, “Eu sou Christopher Praisner!” and we were off to the races. I handed over all of the documents Jill had sequenced in my folder, paid my €177.40 application fee, and I was out in 15 minutes for a celebratory toastie and a cappuccino at a nearby cafe where Jill, Stephanie, and I ate on our first trip to see our digs back in January. I only had two difficulties and they’re both humorous in retrospect:

1. The person doing my paperwork put down an address on my form that didn’t match our mailing address. As politely as possible I tried to make her understand that she had entered the address wrong. I even showed her the mailing address on our proof of health insurance, which is correct, but she would not deviate. It turns out that our lease document contains the legal description of our rental taken from the deed on the property rolls at the tax office, as opposed to the mailing address… and both Jill’s person and my person used that legal description for the address we will have on file for our residency applications and, more important, the address our cards will be mailed to. After some subsequent back and forth with our attorney, she assures us it is a perfectly legal address for us to use on the residency application so there’s no issue with our application, but there’s some question as to whether our cards will be delivered to us successfully. That’s not the end of the world, but it means we may have to track them down if they don’t show up. In the mean time I took our label maker that I brought with us and put PRAISNER as prominently as I could on our mail slot. We are also going to try to befriend our CTT mail carrier and let them know that we are expecting our residence cards that may be slightly mis-addressed. Time will tell.
2. The second difficultly was just full-on funny. Portugal has this rule where you don’t show up with documents that you’ve signed – you sign in front of the person you are handing the document to. That makes sense to me. The funny part is the person witnessing your signature aways says “exactly as it is on your passport”. So, I get to the end of my residency application appointment and the last thing I need to do is sign the application on a digital pad. I signed once and the person holding my passport looked at my signature on the monitor and shook her head and said try again. I repeated that process three more times and got the head shake each time. I had no idea what to do at that point so I looked at her with a supplicating gesture, whereupon she told me that on my passport the “i” in Praisner does not have a dot on it and I was dotting the i on the digital pad. Rather than having to remember not to dot the i on future government encounters where I present my passport, I have added the missing dot to my passport signature.

Jill was lucky to have Diana to help her navigate both the town of Viseu, where parking was nearly impossible to find, and the logistics of the appointment. Where my facility had on site parking, clear instructions, and an information desk, Jill’s did not. Diana got Jill to the right room in the right building and Jill took it from there.

The appointments ultimately worked out just fine. Because each AIMA office does their own end-to-end processing, each office has its own turnaround time. Based on our respective AIMA locations, Jill can expect her card in the next couple of weeks and my card will take at least 120 days – which puts me at the end of August before I can expect it.

Having our successful AIMA appointments under our belts was a HUGE relief. Even though we (and by we I mean Jill) have done everything leading up to this point by the book and knew there was no reason our residency applications wouldn’t be successful, we’ve taken a big leap of faith by moving here with Woody and Bulleit – so getting through this final residency wicket was a very big deal emotionally.

Under the heading of general commerce, we have now successfully ordered and received a couple of deliveries at home. I ordered some all-weather car mats for the Austral and Jill ordered a delivery from Ikea near Lisbon. Those were small victories, but it feels good to have a transaction work end-to-end even with the language barrier.

We have also stepped up our efforts to learn Portuguese. We got a recommendation for a local tutor, Leonor, who met us at a cafe to talk about our goals for learning the language. We hit it off right away and now we meet with Leonor for two hour sessions on Tuesdays and Fridays.

We went to the Junta (the local municipal offices of our town) to get a start on our Atestados de Residência (an official document that says we are residents of São Martinho do Porto). The nice lady gave us two blank applications and instructions on how to complete them (in Portuguese).

Why do we need an Atestado? In order to register for the Portuguese national healthcare system we have to have :

1. Our residency cards from AIMA
2. An Atestado from SMP, signed by the mayor himself, that shows we’ve been residents here for 90 days

To get our Atestados we have to have present proof of accommodation (our lease) and the signatures of two Portuguese citizens who are residents of SMP to the Junta – and pay €5.60 each (a thing that I’ve learned since we got here is all interactions with the government come with some sort of fee). If it all checks out we will get a letter from the mayor that says we are bonafide residents of our little town. We asked Leonor and our next door neighbor, Ilda, very nicely if they would sponsor us into the club and they were both happy to do it.

We’ve become regulars at the local farmer’s market. We have our favorite person to buy from and I have a routine with her where she teaches me a new Portuguese word for something we are buying each time we shop (for example: cilantro is “coentros” in Portuquese). She’s also helping me get better at paying for our produce with exact change in Euros. She will say the total price of our accumulated purchase in Portuguese and wait patiently while I dig out exact change – and corrects me gently when I get it wrong.

In a surprise, we found some jalepeño plants at a local garden store!

Those plants are now repotted, soaking up sun on our patio, and already have a few tiny peppers on them. I also bought some cayenne pepper seeds and planted a few of those.

We took W&B to the veterinarian in SMP for an introductory visit to get vaccinated for a parasite we don’t have in the US and to get their EU passports. There’s a requirement for their chips to be registered in the national system within 30 days of arrival.

I’ll close with this in terms of us getting settled in. Weather permitting, we’ve been walking Woody and Bulleit 5 miles on the beach every morning. We get up and have a cup of coffee then head down our hill and into town and then hop onto the beach and walk all the way around the bay and back. We mostly have the beach to ourselves in the morning. Yesterday we were on our outward leg of our walk and Amanda, a new friend who is a recent arrival from Hong Kong, intercepted us on the beach to tell us that there were two people in town looking for the people with the two golden retrievers. Turns out it was another couple we’d met, but not exchanged numbers with. They got their message to us by telling someone they were looking for the two people who walk their golden retrievers on the beach every morning.

Adventure is out there!

T minus 44 days until liftoff!

Moving to Portugal sounds great in the abstract, but it’s getting less abstract by the day. And less abstraction equals more logistics.

Fortunately I’m married to a certified Project Manager. Jill has every discrete move-related task detailed in an Excel sheet with owner, due date, and completion status.

Ok, but REALLY how much stuff can that be, you might ask?

We are currently at 102 discrete tasks and climbing…

I was supposed to be winding down at Boundless by now, but the project that I’ve been trying to deliver before I ride off into the sunset just WILL NOT DIE. So I still don’t know exactly what my last day in the office will be.

That means that, until I have line of sight to my Boundess end-date, Jill is carrying more than her share of the load on move related items and I’m focused on a few major things that are in my sweet-spot task-wise.

My current headline tasks include:

1. Scheduling cancellation for any subscriptions services we don’t need – Au revoir, Spectrum!
2. Getting our US mobile numbers ported off of AT&T and onto a cost-efficient and reliable MVNO (Tello) so that our US numbers continue to work seamlessly in Portugal as backups to our new primary Portuguese numbers from Vodafone.
3. Getting our US banking moved to a bank that is explicitly expat-friendly – Pro-tip: You do not want to try to rush this particular transition because just when you think you are through you will find another quarterly or annual automated-debit that you forgot about.
4. Getting us enrolled in private health insurance in Portugal, which we are mandated to have from the date of our AIMA residency appointment until we receive our resident cards and are enrolled in Portugal’s universal healthcare.
5. Buying a car in Portugal that will be ready when we step off the plane on April 23
6. Getting Portuguese car insurance for said car
7. Dispositioning our two current cars just before we decamp
8. Letting the nice people at USAA know that we will be renting out our Austin house while we are gone and making sure our homeowner’s policy reflects that.

On the topic of buying a car in Portugal… It was a good week. We have secured a 2023 Renault Austral from the very-easy-to-work-with Luis at Santogal Renault in Lisbon!

You may recall that our friend Bruno, who was our guide around the Douro Valley on our second scouting trip, suggested that we look at the Renault lineup because every village in Portugal has a Renault mechanic and Renault parts are always in good supply. His suggestion was to buy a slightly used model with a little warranty left. I thought I understood what he meant by that last bit at the time, but I have since learned what he REALLY meant.

I’m no expert in EU taxes and VAT, but what I can tell you is that the 23% VAT that Portugal levies on “new” vehicle sales feels pretty onerous. But it turns out that there’s a life hack – and that’s what Bruno was trying to convey that I didn’t pick up on initially.

The key to this particular life hack is the definition of the word “new”. It turns out that in Portugal, for VAT applicability purposes, “new” means that a vehicle has been registered less than six months AND has less than 6,000KM on the odometer.

What the dealerships do is register cars from the factory as “Service” cars, which means that that registration starts the clock on the “used” status of a car. The staff of the dealership get allocated Service cars as their personal vehicles knowing that they will take them out of Service status at either the six month or 6,000KM mark. And the dealership personnel are motivated to keep them pristine as these are the cars they will ultimately be selling to the end consumer without the bite of the 23% VAT.

And THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is how we find ourselves with a “used” 2023 Renault Austral Hybrid that was registered as a Service car September 29, of 2023 has 3600KM on the odometer. We have paid a 20% deposit and will close the transaction in a couple of weeks after six month anniversary of the initial registration. And at that point we will have 30 months of the original 36 month factory warranty remaining.

The other area where we had significant forward progress this week was in lining up the private health insurance we need to have in place at the time of our AIMA residency appointments. Even though we technically only need this insurance for 4-6 months, every expat we’ve spoken to has kept their private heath insurance in force for the duration of their stay in Portugal. From what we understand private insurance has a couple of discrete benefits:

1. With private insurance you set up your relationship with your doctors directly vs the public system where you get assigned doctors somewhat randomly. Being able to select doctors, at least initially, that speak English seems like a major plus to us.
2. With private insurance there are no waits for non-emergent situations. Not that Jill or I plan on any hip or knee replacements any time soon, but those kind of elective surgeries can have a waiting period in the public system based on capacity and availability.

None of the above is a knock on Portugal’s universal healthcare scheme, which seems to do a good job overall while struggling with the same challenges around wait times for elective procedures that are common to universal healthcare schemes the world over. And if anything emergent or life threatening happens you get right in to the public system, which is better equipped than the private system for major trauma and complex care. Here’s an interesting assessment of worldwide healthcare that we ran across in our research. And for those of you scoring at home, at 82.42 years, Portugal’s current life-expectancy is 2.5+ years longer than that of the United States, which clocks in at 79.74 years.

Way back when we started this process, Jill got us connected with the medical concierge team from Serenity in Portugal. Michael who owns Serenity, and is awesome, has been patiently guiding us through the ins and outs of picking a private insurer.

Michael connected us with, Ana Rita, our new insurance agent in Portugal who got us quotes from multiple insurers. And Michael and Ana Rita tag-teamed our slate of questions about how private health insurance works in Portugal.

My experience with the US healthcare system has jaded me and, for that reason, I’ve made the conscious decision that we will be over-insured in Portugal. For anyone interested in insurance costs in Portugal, we got quotes for various coverage levels from the two largest local private insurers in Portugal and the best option from one carrier was going to have a combined monthly premium of €204.91 (roughly $220) for me (age 59) and Jill (age 54). Because it included dental and vision and a couple of other “just in case” provisions I decided to go with the best option from the other carrier which will have monthly premiums of €325.20 (roughly $350). We have a call with an English-speaking nurse that works with our new private health insurer on Monday to go through our medical questionnaire for enrollment.

One interesting thing about medical insurance in Portugal, it generally doesn’t cover prescription drugs. That freaked me out a little bit, but I learned from Michael at Serenity that’s because all residents are eligible for the prescription drug coverage of the universal system. So if the doctor you see with your private health insurance prescribes you something that prescription is registered with the national system and you access it on your phone. Then you go to any pharmacy, pull out your phone and they scan the QR for your prescription, fill it, and update the national registry. What that means is that you can fill your prescriptions anywhere in the country at any time, not just at the pharmacy where your prescription is registered as it is in the United States. And Michael assures us that the first time we go get a prescription filled we will be very pleasantly surprised at the amount we are charged compared to the US.

And in the middle of all of the health insurance back and forth, we secured our car so Ana Rita is now our agent for auto insurance as well. I also consciously chose to be over-insured on the auto front. In Portugal, auto insurance goes with the car so that anyone who drives that car is insured. Perfectly adequate insurance on our new Renault Austral was going to be €365.16 (about $400) per year. The most comprehensive auto insurance available is going to set us back €778.86 and that’s for a zero deductible. Another nice thing about Portugal is that ALL auto insurance covers roadside assistance and towing. So in the event of a mechanical failure the minimum required auto insurance will rescue you and get your vehicle to the repair facility for the low low cost of FREE.

While I’ve been having fun with buying cars and getting insurance lined up, Jill is doing a dizzying array of more complicated things.

When she’s not busy finding loving homes for all of the possessions we are not taking with us to Portugal – which is basically anything that won’t fit in a suitcase – Jill has been getting Woody and Bulleit’s travel plans squared away. We have engaged petrelocation.com, whose CEO is a friend of a friend, to give W&B the white glove treatment while getting them safely from Austin to Lisbon. Kristina, at petrelocation.com, is our person and will be on point from now until we have proof of life on the other side.

Jill and Kristina are working through the checklist to get the boys ready for their big adventure.

One of the things Kristina needs us to do is figure out what size kennels the boys need for the trip. That has been a comic endeavor. It turns out that neither dog understands the command “Please hold still while I measure you in multiple dimensions.” So at Kristina’s suggestion we’ve devolved to blue painter’s tape on the wall so that we can send pictures to her. That’s only slightly better, because the dogs don’t understand “Please stand in front of this rectangle of blue tape” any better than the other thing. Needless to say they are both getting an extra ration of treats with all of the attempts to lure them into position.

At any rate, assuming we can ultimately get the boys’ measurements to Kristina, the general logistics are set:

Kristina’s team will ensure that boys will board a nonstop Lufthansa flight from Austin to Frankfurt that departs at 3:40PM on Monday April 22nd. They will spend the night of April 23rd at the pet hotel at the Frankfurt airport, where they will hopefully be able to share a room, and the staff will send us photos and videos.

Once we hand the boys off on Monday we will head for the airport and board our own flight from Austin to Lisbon (via a connection at Dulles) which puts us in Lisbon at 10:30AM on Tuesday April 23rd. We will use that day to pickup our car and visit our local pet store in SMP, where Jill has already befriended the owner who will have a bag of our preferred food ready for us to pick up (also on the project plan).

Then the boys will be on the first flight from Frankfurt to Lisbon that arrives after Customs opens on Wednesday April 24th. The petrelocation team will be there when they get off the plane and walk them through Customs in Lisbon. And we will be waiting for them on the other side!

Lots still to do, but we are getting through the major items.

Adventure is out there…

Well, it finally happened. Portugal has called our bluff…

When we applied for our D7 visa on December 11th in our nation’s capital, there were still enough administrative gates that we had to get through that living in Portugal was still feeling a bit hypothetical. Even our recent trip to check out our new digs in SMP felt like we were still “pretending” we were going to live in Portugal, because our visas were still pending. I can report that, as of 12:42 PM CST on Wednesday February 14, 2024, play time is officially over.

That’s the timestamp on the email Jill and I both received from the Embassy of Portugal which read:

“Dear Sir/Madam

We inform that your visa was approved and is now ready to be issued, you can send us your passport so we can stamp the visa and mail it back to you as soon as possible…”

By 12:43 PM CST, Jill had texted me: “We have visas!!!!!!”

And at 12:45 PM CST I texted back: “Holy sh*t!!!!!!”

Within an hour Jill was at the UPS Store, overnighting our passports to the Embassy of Portugal. I bet you’re thinking…

Wait, overnight via UPS? Isn’t that FedEx’s sweet spot?

It turns out that the Embassy of Portugal prefers UPS. We know that because:

1. Jill is a member of the Facebook group “Americans & FriendsPT” and their foolproof steps to getting through the visa process say specifically to use UPS NOT FEDEX
2. When we applied for our visas in December at VFS, part of our application fee went toward a return UPS Overnight envelope that the Embassy of Portugal would ultimately use to return our newly-festooned passports to us. That was kind of a neat touch for reasons I’ll expand upon momentarily
3. There are first-person reports of people Fedex-ing their passports to the Embassy of Portugal and the passports disappearing completely somewhere between the gates of the Embassy and their internal destination of the Consular Section. And then the people whose passports disappeared had to get replacement passports. But when the replacement passports were sent correctly VIA UPS, the new passport number didn’t match the passport number on the original visa application. So the Consular Section would not paste the visa into the new passport – meaning those poor Fedex-using-unfortunates had to start all over!

Sure enough, by 10:30 EST on Thursday February 15th we had confirmation that our passports were safely through the gates of the Embassy of Portugal.

We were kind of expecting them to take a day or two to get our visas affixed and headed back to us. This is where the pre-paid UPS envelope from our VFS visa appointment came in…

We already had the UPS return tracking number from our December 11th VFS appointment! So Jill preemptively set up UPS alerts for that tracking number and before end of day on Thursday it was already pinging her from the UPS system and showing delivery in Austin on Friday morning.

One of the interesting aspects of the visa process we’ve just been through is that there are some details that you just don’t know until you get your passport back with the visa in it. The two key details that are emblazoned on the visa are:

1. The start date of the visa, which in our case is March 1
2. The web-link for the visa-holder’s pre-scheduled non-negotiable Agency for Immigration, Migration, and Asylum (AIMA) appointment

I’m going to nerd out on our Portuguese visas for a moment…

Portugal has its own sovereign visa regime, but as part of both the EU and the Schengen Area Portugal has to color inside of those two bloc’s visa rules. US passport holders can generally enter both the EU and Schengen Area as a tourist without a visa. However, there’s something called the “Schengen 90/180 Rule” that comes into play for us. What that rule means is that you can be in Schengen Area without a visa for 90 days in any 180 day period and once you’ve reached your 90 day mark you have to exit the Schengen region for at least 90 days. You can bop back and forth between Schengen Area countries as much as you want under the 90/180 regime, but all days in the Schengen Area count toward your 90 days. There are a couple of EU countries that are not part of the Schengen Area (Ireland and Cyprus) and four non-EU countries that are a part of the Schengen Area (Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein), but for the purposes of our example we are all-Schengen Region all the time.

Now we get to the Portuguese visa that Jill and I have just been issued, which is called the Portugal D7 Residence Visa. The D7 visa itself does not authorize us to reside in Portugal. The D7 visa authorizes us to REMAIN IN PORTUGAL UNTIL OUR RESIDENCY REQUEST HAS BEEN ADJUDICATED, meaning that we can stay in Portugal from first time we enter with our new visas until we are approved for formal residency by the AIMA so long as we don’t re-enter Portugal via passport control more than one additional time prior to being approved for residency.

If the process is working as intended, one gets their D7 and must enter Portugal via passport control point after the start date of the visa, but less than 120 days after the start date. Satisfactory evidence of entry is a dated entry stamp in our passport or a boarding pass for our inbound flight.

This brings us to the second important piece of information imprinted on our visas: the web-link to our respective AIMA appointments.

D7 visa holders must present themselves to AIMA at the appointed time and place with proof that they’ve entered Portugal since the start date of their visa and a packet of supporting documentation for their residency application. That packet contains much of the same type of information we provided with our initial visa application, but with a bias toward proving that we are living in Portugal. For example, at our VFS appointment we had to show US assets that would support us moving and at the AIMA appointment we have to show Novo Banco monthly statements that indicate we’ve been funding and using that account for ongoing operating expenses in Portugal. We also trade out the Schengen Travel Insurance, which we had to get to apply for the visa and will repatriate us back to the US in the event of medical catastrophe while we are waiting for residency, for evidence of private health insurance in Portugal until we are eligible for Portugal’s national healthcare system – which happens when we are granted residency in Portugal. We are not concerned with pulling together the requisite AIMA packets, because Jill has been all over this for the better part of a year. But the important bit is that we cannot miss our scheduled AIMA appointment.

And on the other end of the AIMA appointment, our D7 visa only allows us one additional exit/entry through Portuguese passport control until we get our residency cards, which I assume is a nod to the Schengen Area rules and the fact that the D7 visa is in place to let us exceed the Schengen 90/180 rule while we await formal residency.

Our AIMA appointments are… DRUMROLL PLEASE….

April 30th! Jill’s is at 11:00 AM and mine is at 11:30AM.

Piece of cake, right? Not so fast…

Jill’s appointment is in Viseu, 2 hours and 15 minutes from SMP, and mine is a scant 30 minutes later in Coimbra, 1 hour and 15 minutes down the road from Viseu.

Appointment transportation logistics notwithstanding, that means we have to be boots and paws on the ground in Portugal for the duration sometime during the week of April 22.

That’s nine weeks and change from today.

There’s a whole bunch to do in those nine weeks, but the top priority is getting everything in place to get Woody and Bulleit safely from Austin to SMP. That’s the biggest move-related stressor either of us have. We are working with PetRelocation.com to get that sorted.

The plan is to rent out our Austin house while we are gone which means we’ve also got to get whatever we are not moving to SMP out of the house, and disposition cars, etc.

And I’ve already started working on lining a new-to-us Renault in Portugal.

Adventure is indeed out there…

Saturday January 27, 2024

Before we left Austin for this trip Sevilla connected us with our new friends Jason and Lesa, expats from Seattle and the tenants who just vacated our SMP rental. After renting Sevilla’s place in SMP for most of 2023, in December Jason and Lesa bought something just down the hill that they’d had their eye on.

There are multiple things that I find comforting about this setup:

1. If we have any questions about the house, we have Jason and Lesa to ask
2. Jason and Lesa liked the area enough that they bought within a quarter of a mile of our rental, which seems like a good omen.
3. We have yet another set of new friends who are a year ahead of us on the learning curve.
4. Before we move if we have anything that needs to be delivered we can send it to Jason and Lesa (we’ve already taken advantage of that once).

While planning our trip, Jill lined up a date for 11AM this morning to have Jason and Lesa show us SMP through their eyes. A few minutes before 11 Jill, Stephanie, and I trooped the quarter mile down Estrada do Facho (that’s our street) to Lesa and Jason’s. We had a bit of a comedy of errors trying to figure out Jason and Lesa’s address. Addresses in Portugal are like a MENSA test. They include lots of abbreviations and symbols. For example, in the US where we would have an apartment number that indicated the floor, such as apartment 210 being on the second floor, in Portugal they have a “2°” to indicate the second floor and then instead of an apartment number they have an indicator as to whether the door is on the right or the left of the entryway/landing. So, in summary, if your street address is 80 Estrada do Facho and you are on the first floor (what we would call the second floor NOT the ground floor) and your door is on the right (“direito” in Portuguese -which is abbreviated “Dto”) of the landing the street portion of your address would be written something like:

“80 Est. do Facho 1° Dto”

That all seems pretty straight forward in concept, but reality isn’t so tidy when you start to take into account that there are abbreviations for Portuguese words we haven’t learned yet that are included in addresses, such as basement, alley, and even roundabout. If you’re interested here’s a primer for Portuguese addresses – How Portugal Addresses Work.

Fortunately, Jason knew we were coming and was looking over his balcony periodically. He caught sight of us wandering around cluelessly and yelled at us to stay put and he would come to us.

After initial introductions – and affirming our unbroken streak of all the expats we’ve been introduced to by mutual acquaintances being helpful and friendly – we set off on foot to SMP.

Our rental is about a 15 minute walk from city center. When going into town the first 10 minutes is downhill and when coming back the last 10-15 minutes is uphill. I say 10-15 minutes because Lesa and Jason showed us multiple possible routes that are either more direct, with steeper grade or more leisurely. When we have visitors we can offer up the best route home depending on our guest’s thirst for exertion (and we will have a car as a fallback – as we certainly don’t want anyone to skip a visit because we live on the top of a hill). But, in all cases, I think we can safely pencil in 15 minutes as the appropriate lead time for walking to city center from our place.

We meandered through town with Jason and Lesa and got a little more of their backstory as we chatted and strolled. Jason is in tech and works remotely for his employer in Seattle from Portugal. On weekdays he keeps office hours that generally align with the Seattle workday. And Lesa is a chef, which is super handy for us since she already knows all of the Portuguese names for spices and has lots of handy local tips… Like: Vinegar and baking soda for cooking are on the cleaning products aisle at the Intermarché, not in the places you would find them in an American supermarket.

Jason steered us into the local tourism office, where we met the Gastão. Gastão technically mans the tourism office, but Jason described Gastão as a source of local knowledge for expats and a “fixer”. One of the things Jill and I love about Portugal is that every Portuguese person that we spend more than a couple of minutes with is truly proud of their country and heritage. Gastão was no exception. Gastão gave us an engaging local and national history lesson for about 20 minutes before we begged off because we knew Lesa and Stephanie were standing outside waiting for us to come out. We also learned where City Hall is in SMP and what kind of things you do there – foremost being we need to register as residents of SMP when we make the official move. And when we wandered by the front of the tourism office a couple of days later Gastão greeted us by name like we were old friends.

By then was lunch time so we went to one of Jason and Lesa’s favorite restaurants, Samar, a block or so inland of the marginal where we lingered over a nice seafood lunch and an after-lunch cappuccino. I’ve mentioned this before, but we love that the restaurants and cafés in Portugal don’t rush you out the door. I’ll report back on whether that changes during tourist season, but at least during the low season they are perfectly happy to let you linger until you ask for the check.

Lesa showed us where the “local” market was. I think I’ve broken the code on expat market terminology. The chain stores like Intermarché are “supermarkets”. The farmers’ market and fish markets are “fresh markets”. And the local family-run grocery store is called a “local market”. Supermarkets are open set hours every day. The fresh markets tend to be open every morning until about lunch time. And the local markets are open unless they’re not. For example, the local market was open on the day that Lesa walked Jill through it, but when we walked by a couple of days later there was a sign on the door that said they’re closed until 5 Febrero (Febuary 5th). In a town like SMP, which caters mostly to Portuguese tourists, I think everyone works non-stop during the tourist season and then takes their breaks when they can during the offseason. And apparently Tuesdays are the days lots of restaurants are closed during the offseason. So much to learn about SMP!

I’d noted that we had a couple of burned out lightbulbs in the rental so I asked Jason where I could find those. He walked us to what looked like an everyday waterfront touristy beach essentials/trinket shop. It was indeed a beach shop in the front of the store, but after we waded through the beach essentials it turned into a combination home goods/light hardware store. In local parlance these are called “loja Chinesa”(literally “China shop”). So called because they are owned and run by Chinese expats who import a broad range of essentials from China and purvey an amazing variety of products under one not-so-big roof. I felt uneasy with this naming convention – I probed on that with Jason who said “I know! I was worried about that, too. But it’s just a case of using an accurate descriptor that doesn’t seem to carry any offensive goo.” And in this case the storefront sign said “Loja Pequim” (Beijing Shop”) which tells me the owner is leaning in to the theme. Case closed. And sure enough my lightbulbs, one of which had an obscurely small base, were right there on the shelf in the back of the Loja Pequim.

All of the expats that we have met have been willing to talk about both the good and the bad about living in Portugal. In Jason’s case, his personal example of the “bad” is the bureaucracy around getting Internet installed in their new place. Fiber has arrived in SMP, but the bulk of the last mile infrastructure is still coax and ADSL, which is what’s in Jason and Lesa’s building. However, the Internet provider has decided they’re not going to do any new Internet activations in that building until the fiber buildout reaches the building because they don’t want to make a new legacy-technology connection only to re-wire it in a few months. So while that is getting sorted out, Jason has had to use a hotspot for his Internet connection. There’s no higher power to appeal to, it just is what it is until something changes. Fortunately, Sevilla’s place has great Internet and it’s included in our lease.

After we’d completed the initial tour, we walked with Jason and Lesa back to their place, picked up a package from the Moshers that they’d been holding for our arrival, and powered up the last quarter mile of hill for a little siesta. But before the siesta, Jill opened the package to find her new prize possession, an EU compatible Dyson hairdryer along with some Parisian socks with chats on them. We’d heard that 220V will cook an American hair dryer right quick and I think Mia knew Jill would be in the market. It was a thoughtful and fun housewarming gift that made Jill light up! And I claimed most of the Cipsters (the box says Crackster, but they’ll always be Cipsters to me).

To further our audit of the food and libations on offer in SMP, our evening included a walk to city center to have a cocktail at Storyteller’s Palace followed by Indian food at New Royal.

Storyteller’s Palace is a great spot for a romantic date night and for us to take visitors for an aperitif. And, with all of the boutique rooms named for notable authors, it’s also a good overflow accommodation if we ever have more guests at one time than we can house. It’s funny how quickly we’ve gotten accustomed to Portuguese prices. Storyteller’s Palace is definitely aiming for an “American” experience (case in point: they have a speakeasy bar called Gatsby’s). Their drink prices are in line with what have become mid-range American prices on cocktails (think $12 gin and tonic). That will by no means keep us away, but Jill and I both acknowledged the reaction that a price we wouldn’t think twice about in Austin felt a little jarring in SMP.

After our drink at Gatsby’s, we strolled around the bay to New Royal.

Over the course of planning to eat at New Royal, we discovered that Stephanie had never had a proper introduction to Indian food. We set out to fix that by ordering a broad selection from New Royal, which left us with plenty of leftovers for dinner the next night. Style-wise we had a biryani, a korma, a tikka masala, and a butter chicken along with the requisite garlic naan and samosas. Stephanie appears to be a convert.

Summary of the day’s boxes ticked:

✅ Made two new friends

✅ Learned the various walking routes to and from town

✅ Got a walking tour of SMP through the eyes of locals

✅ Discovered the China shop phenomenon

✅ Found barber shop

✅ Tried two new restaurants (both keepers)

✅ Confirmed Storyteller’s Palace is a triple threat – happy hour, date night, overflow guest lodging

Adventure is out there!

It’s been a busy few days here in SMP. We’ve been trying to balance getting things sorted for our upcoming move with showing Stephanie around.

On Friday we went to Nazaré, both to show Stephanie the sights and to meet up with our new friends Jane and Steve. Turns out Jane and Steve are friends of our neighbor, Margie, in Austin and moved to Nazaré about a year ago. When Margie found out we were planning to move to Portugal this year she connected us with Jane and Steve.

Jane alerted Jill to the fact that there is an expat brunch every Friday morning at Village Brunch and Coffee on the main the square in Nazaré so we made a point to be there at the appointed time to introduce ourselves.

Once we’d finished our breakfast and introduced ourselves to the welcoming group of expats, we began the trek up to Sitio. The funicular is currently out of service while a public works project is underway to stabilize the cliff above the tracks – so we hoofed it to the top. The walking trail up to Sitio from Nazaré is fairly steep but mercifully short and offers great views.

We had an hour or so to kill before we were to meet Jane and Steve, which gave us time to show Stephanie the surfing landmarks that appear in “100 Foot Wave”.

By the time we climbed back up from the lighthouse, it was time to meet Jane and Steve – who introduced us to a great seafood place overlooking Nazaré – Restaurante Sitio dos Petiscos.

After lunch we walked to Jane and Steve’s place and they spent an hour patiently answering questions about the good and bad of making the jump to Portugal. That’s a conversation we try to have with every new expat acquaintance we make. We generally hear the same things from each person we talk to, but periodically we get a new twist. For example, EVERYONE we talk to says: Never expect to accomplish anything “official” in Portugal on the first try – they’ll always find a form that you filled out wrong or some document you forgot to bring. And the corollary is – Scheduling more than one errand in a day is a rookie mistake.

Steve did his homework and purchased a late-model Renault Clio (underscoring the advice we’d already received from our Porto tour guide Bruno about what car to buy in Portugal). Steve also connected me with the Renault dealership where he bought his car. I’ve already lobbed in a message to João at Santogal Renault in Lisboa to see if he can track down a gently used Renault Austral with an automatic transmission for me. The Austral is roughly the same size as Jill’s current car and has room for us to pick up guests and luggage in LIS.

Another benefit of chatting with Jane and Steve is that they turned us onto Continente. Continente is another chain of large format grocery stores that are in the larger towns in Portugal. Nazaré is big enough to have a Continente, but SMP is not. Aldi and Lidl are also good large format options. We left Jane and Steve and went straight to Continente before heading back to SMP. One of the interesting things about Continente is that they appear to lease out part of their footprint to adjacent businesses. For example, the Nazaré Continente contains a Worten, which is an appliance/electronics store, where we bought a space heater for our rental. Unless we find something better, we are likely to make 20 minute drive to the Nazaré Continente for big shopping runs.

Another thing that happened at the Continente is, while we were looking for tortillas and refried beans (we found the former, but not the latter), we bumped into a lady with a whole armload of tortillas. She was clearly an American expat so Jill struck up a conversation with her and ended up getting the name and number of a person who grows their own jalapeños and makes pico de gallo. I mention this because one thing led to another and Jill left Continente with contact information for no fewer than 6 expats who are also in the store, some of whom had already heard about us when we bumped into them in the parking lot on the way out. All of that is to say, we are now much less worried than we once were about whether we will be able to find English-speaking people we have something in common with while we burnish our Portuguese.

Even though we’d already had a full day by the time we got back home, the day was not through with us. There’s a restaurant in SMP called Waves that’s owned by a very nice British expat named Mary. Friday nights at Waves are proper Fish ‘n’ Chips. Jill booked us into Waves for dinner where we had a fantastic meal and chatted with Mary as she was making her rounds of the patrons.

And what’s the proverbial cherry on top of a good dinner in SMP? Gelatomania!!!

And just like that our first full day in SMP was in the books…

Adventure is out there!