Portugal

September 21, 2021 marked 20 months since I'd left the United States. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with that. I've had some great trips all over this country in those 20 months. But that was never the plan. 

When we cancelled 2020 trips out of the United States to Costa Rica and England and Rwanda and Uganda and Zanzibar, I figured we'd just move them to this year and just do 2020 in 2021. But that didn't work. No available vaccines in March forced us to move Costa Rica off a penciled in date in late winter or spring to the fall. To...well, pretty much now. But we decided to move that too. Too much COVID. Too much uncertainty. Probably overreacting. But I longed to use my passport again.

We thought about a lot of places besides Costa Rica to go this fall. We talked about Belize and Guatemala. I looked at Antigua and Barbuda, which by the way looks and sounds awesome and is definitely now on the future trips list. I glanced at Namibia when it slipped out of the CDC Level 4 list (it's sickening I'm looking at stuff like that but it's important). No England. No Rwanda or anything else in Africa. 

Then we looked at Portugal. And went. Why not? My passport was gathering too much dust and Portugal has the highest fully vaccinated rate in the world at more than 84% of their population so it seemed about as safe as we were likely to get to go to.

Dad, sister and me. 1972. My dad looks way cooler than I ever will.

This was my third trip there. Portugal is actually the first place I ever remember visiting outside of England where I was born. I'm sure I was four years old. There were two trips abroad earlier than that. My parents took me along with them to Spain when I was just one year into this world and then to Portugal a year later. I don't remember either of those. But I do remember that trip at four years of age.

Not that I really recall much. I told my mother recently I remember eating sardines and something like a road to a beach lined with orange trees. She said that was probably right, which made me feel good about my first travel memories. Other than that, there's not much there, other than the second and third pictures on this blog post which I had scanned into digital files from the slides my mom found in their house. I'm glad I have them. There are maybe a couple of more not on this post too. Somewhere on my hard drive.

It's been 49 years since I was in Portugal. It is likely the single longest absence I will ever have from a country, although let's face it in 13 years or 14 years I could go to Saint Lucia and break that record. I remember a lot more about this trip than I did my second trip all those years ago. I likely moved around a lot more than my parents did in 1972 and I'm glad I went back, even if it was to places I'd really never been to before. Every new place, even if it's sort of an old place sometimes, is an opportunity to learn more about the history and the people of our planet. 

Porto is amazing, by the way. I wish we had way more time there.

I welcomed this trip for far more reasons than a new stamp in the passport. It felt so good to use that thing though. It's been way too long. Here's hoping it won't ever be that long again. Maybe we can finally do most of what we planned to do in 2020 in 2022. Hopefully.

Portugal blog posts to follow.

Mom, sister and me. 1972.