Seattle Visit Part 1

We have now returned from a three-week visit to the US where we observed the loading of our storage unit into a shipping container bound for Portugal and visited friends and family.

After checking in to a hotel near the Porto airport on Tuesday Oct 7, we got up very reluctantly at 2 AM the following day in order to get to the airport the recommended three hours before our 6:15 AM flight to Amsterdam.  Gerrit had actually been awake and worrying for two and a half hours already, so he had had only three hours of sleep that night.

We misunderstood the procedure for long-term parking the car, and so got to the airport later than we'd hoped.  But even at that we were still an hour early!  The baggage check-in counter didn't even open until 4:15.  Before discovering this, we had wandered blearily around the poorly marked airport looking for some kind of baggage check-in.  Eventually we were checked in and on our way to Amsterdam, for a three hour flight.

We had a five-hour layover in Amsterdam, an hour longer than expected due to a maintenance delay on the connecting flight.  During the layover we had lunch, did our Portuguese lessons, bought some electrical adaptors, and caught up on correspondence and some reading.  Then followed the punishing 9-hour flight to Seattle.  It is quite impossible (for us) to get comfortable enough on a jet to get any sleep.  We watched interminable movies and TV shows with increasingly drooping and puffy eyelids, cramped and aching.  Gerrit was at least pleased that his new noise-cancelling headphones worked remarkably well.  He even listened to some classical music with the roar of the engines greatly reduced.  But sleep?  Not a chance.

We landed at SeaTac airport about 4 PM local time, and breezed through customs as easily as we ever have.  We were braced for some kind of hassle, but the whole thing took about two pleasant minutes with the TSA agent, who explained the whole process to us too.  He didn't even look in our carry-on bags, and there wasn't even a line.  We drove the rental car to our hotel for the night, a nearby dump which was undergoing renovation, after picking up some Mexican fast food.  In the room we ate and collapsed after a few minutes of staggering around like brain-dead zombies, forgetting what we were doing about 20 seconds into it.  We had been awake for over 24 hours after a much-too-short night in Porto.

We awoke at a normal-ish local time on Thursday Oct 9 after a better-than-expected night.  We visited some friends near SeaTac and then headed to our storage unit in Interbay to take care of the ominous-sounding voice mails they'd been sending, instructing us to contact them immediately "about our unit".  We had not been able to raise them on the phone.  Had we been broken into again?  Fortunately not; it was only a rental bill owing.  Next we finally contacted our shipping agent who had been ignoring us for almost a week as we were trying to confirm the ship date with him.  Had we just wasted a trans-Atlantic trip because the ship date had changed and the agent was avoiding us?  Fortunately not; the agent was just overworked and had somehow missed our increasingly frantic voicemails and messages.

After clearing up those potential catastrophes we enjoyed terrific burgers at Red Mill and drove around Seattle for a while.  The weather was nice and the October foliage was stunning (unfortunately not captured very well in these photos).  We enjoyed the north end neighborhoods nearby and took a drive through the Arboretum.  Finally we checked into our AirBnB on Queen Anne hill, close to our storage unit so we could easily observe that operation.  We lazed a little in the late afternoon of our new time zone, and then met with Gerrit's siblings and dad at a Redmond restaurant for dinner.  Happy hugs all around, some catching up and storytelling, and then we headed back to the AirBnB for another mostly normal night.

Near Gerrit's old high school on Queen Anne	Sunset over the Olympics from our AirBnB
Some foliage on Queen Anne	More Queen Anne foliage

The next day, Friday Oct 10, we bought three bags of simple groceries for a jaw-dropping $210, put them away, and headed to the house of Pat's old friend Cindy and her tenant, Pat's cousin Jeff.  Cindy had been accumulating shipments that Pat had been directing her way, so we packed up a suitcase full of the stuff and then chatted for a while.  Cindy then went to work and the rest of us went to a BBQ place in Edmonds we like.  It was great to catch up with Jeff, and the ribs were terrific.

Later in the day we began feeling poorly, more so than you'd expect from jet lag.  We'd probably picked something up from the giant Petri dishes they call airports and airplanes.  Pat developed a cough and some cold symptoms too.  For the next day or two we watched movies on the big screen TV in the AirBnB, and did a little local sightseeing on Sunday.

We are finding that one thing we really miss about the US is being able to joke and banter with store clerks or passers-by and understand what everyone is saying.  We've said it before, but a language barrier can be really daunting and isolating.  We didn't think we'd be spending much time with English-speaking expats in Portugal, but the camaraderie of a shared language is really important and we rarely miss our weekly meetings when we're there.

And here is a totally impartial and unbiased comparison tally of the things we like better in Washington or Portugal, now that our visit has refreshed our memories a bit:

• Fresh, cold Washington Honeycrisp apples: wow, we miss these!
• Salmon: sockeye in the northwest US can't be beat
• Crab: Dungeness tops any Atlantic variety we've tried
• Mountains: being surrounded by the Cascades and Olympics here in Seattle is spectacular
• Roast chicken: way better in Portugal
• Wine: same quality costs five times as much in Washington
• Tomatoes: way better in Portugal
• Most vegetables: better in Portugal
• Groceries & restaurants: cost more than twice as much in Seattle

The next few days we began to feel better so we did some sightseeing around the old home town and some visiting with friends.  Wednesday Oct 15 was the last day to hear from the shippers about when they would be at our storage place, and since Gerrit's phone was WiFi-only in the US he had to stay home and miss a nice lunch date.  Then, literally as Pat and friend were walking out the door of our place for lunch, Gerrit got the call.  We got the information, and Gerrit got the lunch.

Seattle scene, Shilshole Bay

More leaf color

(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.)

Read More

Adventures in Project World

Here are the new solar panel farms on the roof.  On clear days here in late September they generate a peak of almost 8 kilowatts of power, enough for the whole house while charging the batteries in about 4 hours.  Interestingly, the panels are almost as efficient at the tipped-back angle of 15 degrees you see here as they would be at their optimum angle of 41 degrees -- like 95% as efficient.  They're unobtrusive and much less vulnerable to the wind at the low angle though.

On Monday Sep 29 Pat had a long visit with our landscapers Alex and Nuno, working out a major plan for the garden and landscaping.  Nuno will start coming bi-weekly for consultations and maintenance.  (We have three Nuno acquaintances now: Nuno the Gardener, Nuno the Installer, and Nuno the Shopkeeper.  We'll try to keep them straight, for us and for you.)

Our big orange tree in front has been producing apparently ripe oranges for a few weeks now, which seems like the wrong season.  They're supposed to be a late winter fruit.  Many of them have split and fallen to the ground, also.  Alex took a look at them, identified the tree as an early-season orange, and found that the split and fallen oranges were perfectly fine if you pare away the bad parts.  He said the splitting might be due to insufficient watering during the summer, which was certainly true.  So Pat gathered up the fruit, cleaned it up, and squeezed some fresh orange juice for us.  (The oranges work just fine in sangria, too.)  Next year we'll water properly since we'll have irrigation installed, and we'll start looking for oranges in September.

On Tuesday Sep. 30 we went to Viana do Castelo, about 20 minutes away, for lunch at a restaurant which had been recommended by a friend.  We visited the Santuário do Sagrado Coração de Jesus (Sanctuary of the Sacred Heart of Jesus) beforehand, a beautiful big church on a hill overlooking the port of Viana do Castelo.  

At the Aquário restaurant Pat ordered grilled sea bass (robalo grelhado) and Gerrit had grilled sea bream (dourada grelhado), and we actually had the restraint to take pictures before digging in.  Lunch was excellent, the fish was light and flavorful, and the staff was friendly and tolerant of our lame Portuguese.  We did a little strolling along the beach boardwalk afterwards.

The robalo (or is it dourada?)

The dourada (or is it robalo?)

On Wednesday Oct 1 a crew arrived to do the wall demolition and conduit installation required to put in our pool cover.  We didn't have much time, since we were leaving on a trip in a week, and we told them that.  They took down most of the low stone wall with a jackhammer, with the idea of leaving a trench for the conduit from pool to garage.

Aaand, the next day no one showed up.  We got a message the night before saying that they could only come in the afternoon, but then that didn't even happen.  Our expat friends agree: it is hard to get projects done here.  Schedules are only suggestions.  Patience and persistence are required.  The latest "suggestion" is that a crew of four will absolutely be here without fail on Monday Oct 6 to completely finish the job.  At about the last minute, this is.  We'll see whether it happens.

On that day the solar panel installer Nuno was also here retrofitting a new garage electrical panel to separate main and backup circuits (and to provide for future growth), which is working fine now.  Our solar panels are back on line, powering the home and charging the batteries, after several hours with no power at all.  The crew installing the conduit (two at first and three after a long lunch, not four) for the pool cover has been doing a good job also, despite being nerve-rackingly late.  This turned out to be a larger job than anyone thought, requiring some concrete work to shore up some eroded spots and deeper drilling than we expected, but they did finish at the end of the day.

We've heard this before, that Portuguese workers seem disorganized and late but after a frantic scramble at the end everything turns out okay.  It kind of goes along with the more laid-back philosophy of "not to worry, everything will be fine".  It will take some time for us type-A Americans to get used to that, but we are.

(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.)

Read More