On Monday Sep 15 we both both went to the last day of the Feiras Novas festival in Ponte de Lima. We got there in the evening, wandered a while as the lights came on, got some street food, and had a great time people- and fair-watching. The Portuguese are fond of their little draft beers (called um fino in the north and uma imperial in the south), and we stopped at a little beer booth for some. Ice cold, refreshing, and nobody cared if we wandered around with our plastic cups of beer. So sensible!
|
The ever-present googly-eyed Feiras Novas lady
|
Pat's loaded hotdog and um fino
|
We did verify that the many truckloads of grapes we keep seeing converging on Ponte de Lima are indeed for the vinho verde coop there in town. Gerrit got lost in a maze of one-way streets trying to pick Pat up at the post office one day, and found himself behind a huge string of grape trucks. He drove alongside them up around the corner to the coop, and there must have been 40 trucks making their way there. The adega (wine cellar) was running full speed, with a big mound of grape stems piling up outside one of the big fermentation vessels. What a sight!
We have finally gotten underway with our solar panel installation. The installer contractor
Nuno started on Monday Sep 15. The panels themselves were not here, but he and his helper got started with the support structures for the panels. It was an enormous amount of work to load forty 35 kg (77 lb) concrete blocks from their truck to the roof by hand. You can see a stack of them in the middle of this picture. They had to do it this way because no businesses were open to rent cranes due to the Ponte de Lima Feiras Novas festival underway. Now that's dedication to the job!
Meanwhile we had not been able to get the panels delivered. The delivery driver called on Friday Sep 12 saying his truck was too big to get to our house, and we hadn't seen an alternate truck appear as of Tuesday Sep 16. The main solar panel vendor
Voltaicos seems to be unable to make the delivery happen and Nuno is running out of time here due to other commitments. After missing installation schedules for four months now it's time to git 'er done. Nuno and his guy are shown on the job here, installing the inverter, batteries, and control box in the garage.
Late in the afternoon of Wednesday Sep 17 the 20 panels finally showed up. Two of them were completely destroyed; it looked like someone had hurled bowling balls at them. Nuno and his helper worked on the wiring and began moving the panels to the roof. A question arose about automatic battery backup switchover, it was starting to look like it would be a really poor manual method, but fortunately we determined that it was automatic. Nuno and crew continued to connect and install, but Thursday Sep 18 is the last day this week they can be here so they will have to return the following week to finish. Annoying to be so near and yet so far, but they are doing a great job so we will be patient a few more days.
Now that we have a date for travel to Seattle, there is a lot to do to prepare. Pat has been lining up travel insurance, we are printing receipts to prove to US Customs that some of the gadgets we'll have with us were purchased in Portugal, we're investigating places to stay and lining up visits, and making sure we have everything we'll need for the loadout and shutdown of the storage unit.
And 8-buck wine here is considered top drawer and given theft-protection caps. (Price tags are usually
above the items in the store, which takes some getting used to.)
(As usual, you can click on any photo to enlarge it, scroll through them all, and click outside a photo when you're done. Also, you can click on the bold underlined phrases to play the audio.)
