motorhome

May Day! May Day!

| Mairead

2018 1

(Here’s me in happier times… at my favourite breakfast place in the town with the house of the oranges, having my favourite breakfast)

We’ve moved on! We are not at the house of the oranges, we are in Ruby! So, the clutch is fixed. We arrived at 5pm on Monday to pick her up, Denis went for a test drive and all was great. Then he went in to pay… This might be useful information for you some day… the garage doesn’t take credit cards. Nope. What were we thinking? We were thinking, how else would you pay such a huge amount? The answer is: In cash…

2018 6

(Most, maybe 98%, of the houses are painted white… here’s the rebel)

We went to the bank to get out the cash. The bank was closed. The bank closed at 3pm. Never mind, there’s an atm. You can’t take that much money out, there’s a daily limit on bank cards. Never mind, we’ll ring the bank, get that raised. Yes they can raise it but… only after midnight, come back in the morning… Nooooo! We looked at each other… now what? We rang the Swiss doctor. Remember him from the day we broke down? He said ring anytime we needed help. We needed help.

2018 1 1

(We have a translations app (above) and this is how we were going to explain to the mechanic that we didn’t have the money. Do you remember the Popeye cartoon in the 70’s where one of the characters says, I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today?)

He didn’t know what to do either. We went back to the garage. On the way we extended our stay at the house of the oranges… again. We didn’t really know how to explain to the mechanic that we didn’t have the money. We had both started to say, Problem! when a man came up to us and said, it’s ok I’m here. Do you remember the Dutch man who just happened to be in the garage the previous Monday and translated for us? Well, he happened to be at the garage this Monday to arrange a chat with the boss mechanic about selling his car! He translated that we didn’t have the money but we would be able to get it tomorrow. Then the mechanic said something… It didn’t look like, that’s great! It looked like, that’s terrible!

2018 2

(Helpful poster in one of our favourite restaurants in the town)

It was terrible, because the next day was the 1st of May – a holiday in Portugal. The garage would be closed. The banks would be closed. Most business in the town would be closed. We would have to wait two more days. Another extension at the house with the oranges… But no, it’s ok, our Dutch translating angel told us he was hoping to meet the boss mechanic for a quick chat the next day and maybe he could arrange for us to bring the money then. He took our number and said he would ring later when he knew. We went to sit in the square. He rang, yes we could meet the boss next day at 10am!

2018 3

(Saw these olives on an olive plant (remember plant not tree!) on the road near the school)

I did not sleep. At 9am we arrived at the atm. Everything was going to be fine…right? Not yet. Our limit had been raised, we started taking out the bundles of cash and then we reached the atm’s limit per card. There’s an atm limit per card… (I hope you’re taking notes.) We still didn’t have enough money. We found another cash machine… it was out-of-order. We did that look again, the one where hope ebbs away. We rang the bank again. Ok, if we buy something using a card at a shop it will reset it. We bought a box of After Eight (I found them very useful later) at the only shop open in the town. The After Eights didn’t reset the card.  We wandered around the town for another twenty minutes looking for another atm… Then we realised we could get cash out on our credit cards… We had two credit cards, we started withdrawing money. (FYI: There’s a card limit on those too.)

2018 5

(One of our favourite tapas dishes last week)

We sat on the footpath outside the bank counting the bundles of notes. (It was a lot of notes – the atm’s in Portugal only handle €20 and €10 notes…no €50 notes.) We finally had enough cash. We set off for the garage. The boss mechanic was there, we handed him the notes and he handed us the keys. We said goodbye to out translating angel and we drove back to the house of the oranges one last time to load up our stuff.

I might have cried on the phone to the lovely lady called Leanne from the Revenue help line later that day but that’s another story. Mairead.

One stitch after another…

| Mairead

2018 1

(This is an old Roman road at the entrance to the olive farm)

Still here at the house with the oranges, in the town with the olive farm, waiting for Ruby to recover. The mechanic has started holding his head in his hands when he sees us… no translation necessary. It seems there’s still a problem. My mother reminded me that this is when I do craft stuff. I left the crafting stuff in the van.

2018 2

(Yummy yarn)

Then I remembered I had two balls of yarn and there was probably a crochet needle in my pencil-case. When I searched I found the laundry bag. Oh yes, the washing… thinking there would be a washing machine I carried our laundry the twenty-minute walk to the house with the oranges. There was no washing machine. First I hand washed the clothes, then I started crocheting.

2018 3

(It says Camel Wool…)

On the first day we arrived in this town we saw a shop with a sign offering accommodation. The lady explained the rooms were a bit far outside the town unless you had transport and we didn’t. As we chatted my eyes wandered to a colourful display – yarn. I realised she sold yarn. She had wool and cotton and a camel wool mix! Camel wool? Really? Anyway. Beautiful colours. Irresistible. I wanted one ball of every colour – just to look at. I bought two balls.

2018 4

(Granny square)

Crochet is very forgiving. Well at least it is the way I do it. My sister-in-law, Kate, taught me that you can join odd unmatched pieces of crochet work together like a patchwork quilt. So that’s what I have been doing ever since. Before that I was stockpiling squares, hiding them in cupboards, finding them when I was looking for something else. Taking them out to marvel at their colour, their texture, their comfort. Wondering how I could have forgotten them. The first one I pieced together made me laugh and cry, it was so surprisingly lovely.

2018 5

(Looks way bigger close up)

I kept crocheting over the weekend. I have no crochet books with me but I know one pattern off by heart, so that’s the one I’m doing. It’s called granny square and it starts with six stitches which are joined together to make a circle. By the third row it starts to look like a square and the square gets bigger as you continue. You can keep going until you run out of wool… or you decide this piece is done. I decide a piece is done when the work in my hand feels big enough, which is different each time. When it’s done you have to close it off so the yarn doesn’t unravel. The piece is actually finished when the yarn is cut. There is a moment when I realise something has been accomplished. Sometimes I notice this moment and sometimes I don’t but when I do it brings a feeling of contentment. Imagine if contentment was so simply attainable.

What if it is? Mairead.

The Olive Farm

| Mairead

2018 9

(One of the olive groves)

There’s an Olive Farm in our adopted town and you can go on a tour. I went along on Friday. It’s just across the road from our garage so we had spotted it last Sunday but it was closed. I booked the tour online and then arrived at the farm at 10am. Two mini busses were arriving at the same time. It turned out they were both full of Sweden visitors on a holiday in Portugal. They had their own Swedish guide who lives in Portugal and speaks Portuguese and French and Spanish and… I can’t remember the other languages. She was so friendly and generously said she loves listening to the Irish accent (what accent?)

2018 2

(Tiago and the olive plant)

The tour was conducted by Tiago (Portuguese for James… like Saint James of Santiago de Compostela and you might remember S.Tiago in the church in Soure?) who spoke perfect English. His tour was really interesting and the first thing I learned was that there is no such thing as an Olive tree! Olives do not grow on trees. They grow on shrubs. In order to illustrate this Tiago brought us to the oldest trees on the farm. He told us they were definitely over 1,000 years old but because they weren’t trees you couldn’t measure their age by the rings. Also, the center of the main stem (or what we’ve been calling, the trunk) disintegrates with age so that the appearance looks like two trees… but it’s not even one tree, it’s a shrub.

2018 3

(One of the oldest olive plants on the farm. Can you see the center has disintegrated?)

Tiago explained the process of farming the olives. The yearly pruning by a Spanish team who are experts in pruning and only prune olive plants and travel to olive farms all around Spain and Portugal. The harvesting of the olives happens in September and is all done by hand by a team of thirty people. The number of people is significant, Tiago told us, because they want the time between the olive being picked and the olive being crushed to be less than 3 hours. So thirty people begin work on a section of the farm. First they lay gathering mats on the ground to catch the olives without bruising. Then one group of harvesters wear scissors on their hands and pick off the olives. The next group has combs (imagine a huge cartoon-sized hair comb) and comb out any remaining olives. The next group search for olives missed by the first two.

2018 1

(Olive flowers)

Then the olives are gathered into the pressing shed. They go through a washing machine, gentle cycle, then a hammering machine, then a stone grinding machine  – with actual stone wheels like the old days for grinding flour but in a machine (imagine a machine with stones? I was very taken by this.) Each time the olives go through a machine the output passes through a sieve. Anything left in the sieves will be used next year for compost. So from the stone machine (I think I like the stone machine because it reminds me of the Flintstones!) the oil goes into huge steel cylinders and each day they turn the tap at the bottom and at first they get some debris not caught in the sieves, then they get water and then oil. The day they turn the tap and just get oil the contents of that cylinder is ready to go to the holding tank. Tiago told us that even at this stage the oil is not ready, it is too bitter, it must sit for a while. I can’t remember how long, but I do know about being bitter and sitting for a while sounds very sensible. Just sayin’.

2018 19

(The stone grinding machine. Can you see the grindstones?)

Then it was time for tasting. I have never tasted Olive Oil… well maybe I should say, I never drank Olive Oil. I remember, for my whole childhood, we had a small little bottle of olive oil in the medicine cupboard. It was used when we had an earache. You heat the oil in a spoon – not too hot – and pour it carefully into the sore ear. It was never used for cooking. Of course as an adult I have used olive oil for cooking. I also mix it with balsamic vinegar for salads… but drinking. I was not looking forward to this. Tiago was such a nice young man I did not want to insult his olive oil but how could I possibly drink it?

2018 25

(Tasting time…)

At the beginning of the tour when we were out visiting the oldest olive shrubs one of the people on the tour asked Tiago if it wouldn’t be more efficient to dig up the old plants and put in new ones. Tiago explained there was no reason to do so as neither the quantity nor the quality of the olives diminish with the age of the plant and also it takes years for the young plants to reach maturity… about 20 years! So I suppose I was already feeling the love for Tiago and the olive farmers who tend and care for the old olive plants and I would definitely be doing my very best to swallow this liquid that I was more comfortable putting in my ear…

2018 21

(The huge cylinders. Can you see the tap?)

… but it was absolutely delicious! Really, it was. I’m not just saying it. I am still amazed. I really enjoyed the tour and learned a lot about olive oil. Like, it doesn’t last indefinitely in your larder (or medicine cupboard) probably up to two years but the way to check? Drink some! And if it’s not rancid then it’s still ok and the tests show the vitamin content remains good too. Also, light and heat make it go off faster, so keep it in the dark and away from the cooker.

I will be drinking my olive oil from now on… Mairead.

Kittens and Coffee

| Mairead

2018 5

(Spring, spring, spring)

We are still at the house of the oranges in the garden. Ruby is still at the garage. We have fallen into a different routine here. Normally we have breakfast and lunch in the van and get dinner out from time to time. This week we are having every meal out. So for breakfast we go to Padeira de Vila (I think it means town bakery) we went there the first morning and we just keep going back. They are really friendly and the way they make Americano coffee is perfect. Breakfast is coffee and a ham roll with orange juice. you can probably guess that the orange juice is not from a bottle. Today we had lunch, a toasted ham and cheese sandwich, I don’t know what kind of cheese it is but it’s amazing.

2018 2

(Poppies and daisies)

It is very unusual for us to repeat a visit to a cafe or restaurant but this week we are and they are starting to notice us. On the second day the waitress (when we were murdering the language with our order for breakfast) said, the same as yesterday? We were delighted and relieved, Yes, please! Em, sim, obrigada, obrigado! Today a lady who works upstairs at the solicitor’s office (see, we are practically locals) came in with an adorable kitten (sorry no photos, imagine a tabby kitten, the size of the palm of your hand, meowing loudly with adorably velvety ears) that someone else had found wandering in the road. The lady in the cafe gave her a box and a container for milk and milk and off she went.

2018 4

(Sunset from last week)

Thirty minutes later she’s back from the chemist with a bag of baby wipes, a lidded jar, a towel and what looks like a baby’s bottle. The kitten is up in her office and she hasn’t been fired yet. We all bond over her dilemma. We understand. We’ve been there. Kittens have such cute little faces. They are so trusting and loveable. How hard could kitten-adoption be? One so young would easily get used to a new home, even a motorhome…

2018 7

(Like a bird on the wire)

It’s getting dangerous to stay here much longer, between the lovely people the beautiful houses, the favourable cost of living and the cute kittens, we are in danger of making snap decisions with far-reaching consequences. Will know later today when Ruby will be ready, probably should keep away from anything cute until then.

Tchau, Mairead.

Thank you, Portugal!

| Mairead

2018 1

(Normally closed these shutters keep the house cool. Can you see the thickness of the wall?)

We are staying in a house on the edge of town, did I tell you that? It’s a very cute traditional Portuguese house. It has shutters on the windows at the front and very small windows at the back and really thick walls. Which all helps to keep the interior of the house very cool. So cool in fact we wear an extra layer when we are inside. It’s the original air conditioning. We have been here three days and I’ve only just realised that something I have been imagining with you, has become real… There are oranges growing in our garden!

2018 3

(Oranges growing in our garden)

Ok I know it’s not technically our garden but it is kinda our garden for today and probably tomorrow and the next day. Einstein seemingly said imagination was more important than intelligence… he was probably thinking of oranges. As well as the oranges, there’s a vine, possibly an almond tree (do almonds grow on trees?) a couple of different palm trees, something that looks like woodbine and a fruit I don’t recognise (picture below.) There are birds tweeting and cars passing on the road outside. Over the road is a field with rows and rows of small trees in blossom but I don’t recognise them either.

2018 1 1

(Unidentified fruit)

This unexpected visit to a real Portuguese house and garden is lovely and the powerful shower is truly lovely. This unexpected week in a small Portuguese town is very different to the way we have been travelling and being temporarily not in control of our destiny has brought up interesting messages…

2018 4

(Also don’t know what theses are…)

Like how much support we have received from the communities in the towns we have travelled through. We have been here in Portugal for two months today. Without the parking spots they provide for motorhomes, without the water and the emptying places, without the electricity and the refuse and recycling bins, without the great mobile data rates, we couldn’t do what we do.

2018 2

(…or this shrub. The flowers smell beautiful)

Sometimes we need a bit of a jolt to realise how incredibly lucky we are and how maybe we’ve been taking it all for granted. Today is a holiday in Portugal. I googled it but at the risk of getting it completely, insultingly wrong, I will find a real Portuguese person to tell me the story. I think it’s going to be about peace and freedom…

Obrigada, Portugal, you are generous and kind and beautiful. Mairead.

Just in time…

| Mairead

2018 1

(Ruby being winched backwards into van hospital)

I’m exhausted. It’s 6am and I’ve been awake for an hour… Denis is snoring loudly this night/morning! I feel a huge fraud saying I’m exhausted when here I am here in a beautiful place with everything working out for my good and I am complaining. Two of my friends have just completed big projects, one had a third of her team missing and the other has a Mum who is very ill. I’m sure they are exhausted. My own mother is in pain and miserable with an ongoing physical complaint. I’m sure she’s exhausted. And you, you have challenges that no one knows about and you bear them yourself. Are you are exhausted? One person’s challenge is someone else’s dream day. This is just my story but maybe any story can be a symbol of every story. It’s a long story so I’ll go back to the beginning or even before the beginning…

2018 2

(Very organised garage)

Less than a week ago I wrote “Something I really love about the motorhome is the flexibility. If your plan doesn’t work out it’s not the end of the world. Another plan is always possible. I’m not naturally optimistic, I have to work at it. Sometimes I am more comfortable thinking about what bad thing could happen so that I can work out in advance what I will do about it. Ruby and this was of living is helping me practice and I actually love optimism. Google it, I think you’ll love it too!”

2018 4

(The boss mechanic won all these trophies playing five-a-aside in the 80’s)

Well you know what they say : be careful what you wish for… I had googled optimism at the time and loved that it said, “…hopefulness and confidence about the future…” I have always loved the word hope. It gets a bad press because it’s related to being attached too rigidly to a specific desired outcome. Maybe I am too attached to a happy ending but I think I love hope because when the ending comes I understand I will (eventually) find the happy in it. In the meantime hope keeps me going.  So my definition of optimism is: finding the happy in difficult situations.

IMG 3244

(Ruby is still in surgery…)

And then we are stuck on a small street in a small town and I don’t know what’s going to happen next. I get through the day finding plenty of happy but don’t sleep that night. My mind is racing… How will me manage until Monday? How will we get water? What if we can’t get internet? What if they can’t work on the problem on Monday? What if the police come to move us on or arrest us? How will we contact the mechanic? If they don’t come how will we push the van around the corner and down a narrow street with cars parked on either side? Will it fit into the doorway? If it does fit where will we stay? How will we get around without transport? How much will this cost? How do I empty the black water cassette so that the mechanic isn’t overpowered by ammonia fumes if this takes longer than a few days? How do we communicate with the mechanic? On and on and on… Answering my mind’s questions is exhausting.

2018 1 1

(There’s a river just up the road from the garage)

There was something else pushing it’s way quietly into my mind as I tried to find answers. Big Picture. Think about the BIG picture. The big picture has none of the little details that my mind was concentrating on. The big picture requires me to stand way, way back to look at the situation. The big picture is like a landscape photograph with green trees and flowing water. there’s me sitting quietly by the water writing, there are birds in the trees and they definitely look like they are singing. I am safe. I am warm. I am still. My mind is quiet. The answers come in the perfect time.

2018 5

(Lemon blossom and…)

Even though I like the big picture and how it makes me feel I still resist it. I want to answer all the questions. I have to answer all the questions or bad stuff will happen. The thing is, there is no way to answer the questions… until the precise moment an answer is required. For example, the question, how will I empty the black water cassette? got answered when I woke on Monday morning at 7am. The answer was clear, walk to the public toilets rolling the cassette behind you, there will be less people on the streets to see or smell you. I have no idea how many people saw me (or smelt me) doing that walk of shame because I was concentrating on the ground and even if there were people judging me, it was not a shameful thing… actually you could call it heroic – I saved the mechanic from ammonia poisoning. My point, it was the perfect answer and it arrived just in time, no sooner.

2018 7

(…lemon blossom bud)

And just in time is a recurring theme… Just at the precise time we needed to communicate with the mechanic a dutch couple who live in the town and speak Portuguese arrived to collect their car. They translated and offered further translation by phone. Other questions didn’t need answers because they didn’t arise… we had just enough water. There was just enough clearance to get into and manoeuvre in the garage (remember the skill of the Portuguese drivers? well this Portuguese mechanic could manoeuvre with centimetres to spare while outside the van pushing it!) Just in time we found a place to stay with wifi and within walking distance of the garage, so we didn’t need our own internet or transport.

We still don’t know when Ruby will be fixed but it’s probably going to be just in time… Mairead.

Everything is fine, just fine…

| Mairead

We had a bit of an adventure today…. Ruby broke!

2018 3

(Ruby on her way to the garage…)

We moved this morning from the orange and lemon campsite during a thunder and lightening storm. We arrived in a small town with very cute small streets and the rain stopped and it got a bit warmer. Then Ruby’s clutch broke… and we were stuck on one of those cute small streets for four hours. Yep we were.

2018 1

(Can you see the planks of wood? They will become important later)

It is an example of the truly amazing agility of the Portuguese drivers that they were able to manoeuvre around us. And there was not one beep of a horn or a cross word. In fact people were coming out of the woodwork to help us. First, there was a man sitting patiently as he waited for his wife and saw our predicament. He directed Denis to a mechanic (as luck would have it the word for mechanic sounds the same in Portuguese) while I stayed in Ruby and searched high up and low down for the emergency triangle. (An emergency triangle is one of the things you must have in your vehicle in Europe… let this be a warning to you…)

2018 1 1

(It was a bit fiddly but I managed to assemble our triangle)

I found the triangle after only a little hyperventilation, managed to wrestle it out of the plastic wrapping and stand it behind the van and then I just sat inside communicating my apologies as expressively as I could to the passing motorists. Within an hour Denis was back with the mechanic who didn’t speak any English, although he didn’t need to, it was clear we were stuck. Then an English and Portuguese speaking Ireland-loving Swiss doctor knocked on our door (yep!) and he translated between Denis and the mechanic and his boss who has just arrived. Turned out the doctor spent a very enjoyable holiday in Ireland and loved all Irish people and couldn’t do enough for us. He was offering to go home and get his jeep to tow us to the garage but the mechanic reminded him that it’s illegal to tow vehicles in Portugal (another useful piece of information, you’re welcome.) We have to ring him on Monday to tell him how we got on.

2018 2

(Ruby getting a lift from our new friend)

The street was bustling with people by now and Denis was on the phone to the emergency breakdown people who said they’d be there in 45 minutes. The man with the tow truck arrived in 40 minutes. Everyone was gone home for lunch when he arrived. It took an hour for him to manoeuvre Ruby into place. She’s a little low on the back so he had to use numerous planks of wood under the back wheels to keep her from scratching along the ground as she was winched onto his truck. It’s not as simple a procedure as you’d imagine. He had to run through the whole wooden planks in reverse when he dropped us off at the garage and here we sit… on the road outside the garage.

2018 4

(That car on the left is a BMW and we were too close to put Ruby down here… eventually the tow truck man had to put her down in the street and both he and Denis pushed Ruby to the curb. Me? I was steering)

The garage is closed until Monday. Then they will investigate our problem and order a part and hopefully we’ll be motoring by Tuesday. In the meantime our grey water is empty so no problem there. We will be making great use of the public toilets in the town so that’s fine. We have a half tank of clean water so that should be okay. But our battery power will probably only last until Monday morning, we will need to do something about that then. Our wifi will probably last until Monday too but I haven’t seen a MEO (mobile internet provider) shop in the town so we may have a challenge with that. And lastly we are parked in a place that’s not designated for motorhomes so we may be getting a visit from the GNR (police)… but you remember our friend the policeman in Soure? Hello Rui! He’s still following us on Facebook and he did say if we every needed his help…

To be continued… Mairead.

Oranges and Lemon

| Mairead

2018 6

(A gift from our French hosts)

We are moving slowly along the Algarve again today… about 15 kilometres from last night’s spot. In the middle of the countryside again at a French campsite… well the owners are French with very good English language skills. We were here a couple of hours when the lady arrived at our door with two oranges and a lemon! Imagine that!

2018 4

(I forgot to include this yesterday, saw it on the beach. I think it’s some kind of sea urchin, close-up it looks like a toy)

Such a simple thing but hugely satisfying to receive. Of course we can buy oranges and lemons at the supermarket, we have been buying them but these ones grew here in this campsite. Imagine, your very own orange tree! I just never get tired of imagining that! And what about a lemon tree?

2018 1

(Wildlife from the day before at the castle)

I have a bit of a cough this week and I’ve been making lemon, honey and ginger drinks. I couldn’t wait to try out our lemon. It might be better, fresher, more medicinal than the ones that have to travel by boat to the supermarket. I bet I’ll be fit as a fiddle tomorrow.

2018 3

(This might be an orange tree. It was at the castle)

I think it tastes the same… as the ones we bought last week in Lidl. I really thought there’d be a difference, a big difference. I was starting to feel better just anticipating the medicinal properties. Maybe the ones in Lidl grew here too. Ha that’s gas! Or…

You don’t think she got them from Lidl, do you? Mairead.

Life’s a beach…

| Mairead

2018 1

(There was a boardwalk to the beach so we took a quick look…)

The Algarve area of Portugal is very popular. We’ve been officially in the Algarve for three days now but most people (or maybe just me?) think of the Algarve as the coast and the beautiful beaches. So today we arrived in that part of the Algarve and we went to the beach. We couldn’t stay though because it was full up…

2018 6

(My feets in the sand! It was warm!)

Well, the first two beach side parking places we tried were full. So we went a little (5 minutes) into the countryside and we can just make out the beach (well, if only I had those binoculars, I could.) and we can definitely see the sea. The wild birds are singing and there’s a few hens doing what hens do…crowing? cock-a-doodling?

2018 5

(Denis looks so excited to be in the sea… oh, maybe he’s complaining because of the cold? It is the Atlantic)

I was a bit concerned that we might find it more difficult to find places to stay once we arrived in the far south especially as it’s getting later in the season and the weather has turned. (Fingers crossed.) But here we are in a lovely place that we might never have found if we’d been able to stay at the beach.

2018 3

(The tide was way out)

Something I really love about the motorhome is the flexibility. If your plan doesn’t work out it’s not the end of the world. Another plan is always possible. I’m not naturally optimistic, I have to work at it. Sometimes I am more comfortable thinking about what bad thing could happen so that I can work out in advance what I will do about it. Ruby and this was of living is helping me practice and I actually love optimism. Google it, I think you’ll love it too!

It’s all good, Mairead.