…now that they’ve seen Lisboa? As I mentioned last week, we had three days/two nights away last week in the big city, and everybody seems to have enjoyed themselves. When planning the trip, Bernice and I decided that we would stay in a decent hotel, rather than an air bnb, and give everyone a proper rest. Having set ourselves a budget for the hotel, we found that our choices were rather limited, and we settled for a better hotel in a less central area.

As it happened, this was a lucky choice, because both the bus station we arrived at in Lisbon, and the attractions we visited while we were there, were not far from the hotel, which was also on the east side of the city, which meant that we never had to travel through the city centre to get anywhere.

Because we were travelling to Lisbon on Sunday, the public transport options were limited. We took a coach from Castello Branco, having driven there from Penamacor after breakfast. After a two-hour-and-twenty-minute ride, we arrived in Lisbon. By the time we took taxis to the hotel and settled in, and were ready for lupper (the equivalent of brunch, but between lunch and supper), we found we were in the Portugal restaurant twilight zone.

Most restaurants here close after lunch, around 3, and reopen only at 7. So, although the hotel was, as I had researched, within easy distance of 4 vegan restaurants, when I phoned around I discovered that none of them was open.

Barely pausing to break stride, we walked to the neighbourhood mini-super and bought a selection of salad vegetables, fruit, crackers, Philadelphia cheese, tinned sardines, disposable plates and cutlery. We then retired to a nearby park and shared a picnic with a gang of streetwise pigeons, on a couple of benches. This certainly suited the kids; Tao thought it was a treat; Ollie was as easygoing as usual; and Bernice and I were in holiday mode and open to new experiences.

As we made our way back to the hotel, the kids said that they planned to stay in the room for the evening, and suggested Bernice and I go out for a romantic dinner alone. I pretended that, after 50 years, dinner isn’t as romantic as it used to be, but the fact is that we both thought it was an excellent idea. So, back at the hotel, we had a rest.

I flicked through the TV’s 27 channels, which comprised, as usual in Portugal, 12 channels of news in Portuguese, 5 channels of game shows and talent shows, all in Portuguese, 4 channels of cartoons in Portuguese, 4 channels of classic cinema, all dubbed into Portuguese, and two channels of Eurosport, one of which was, of course, showing snooker (the Welsh Open final, in fact), with an enthusiastic Portuguese commentary. I then showered. (In hotels, I always shower multiple times a day, which is odd, since I probably get less dirty when staying in hotels than at any other time.)

The shower, incidentally, ticked all the boxes, offering a powerful stream of fairly instant, very hot, water, as well as proper toweliing robes. In fact, we were all very pleased with the hotel. The kids, in particular, had a very spacious corner room, enabling them to set up a carpeted play area for the kids. The breakfast on offer had plenty of options for us, and apart from the coffee (which was as surprisingly mediocre as most coffee I have tasted in Portugal), everything was fresh and of good quality.

The first evening, Bernice and I ate in a vegan Indian restaurant, which was both excellent and pretty good value. On the way back to the hotel, realizing that I had forgotten to bring whisky with me (another indulgence I allow myself daily on holiday in hotels), we stopped at another mini-super and I picked up a very reasonably priced Cardhu 12-year-old, a whisky I’m fond of.

The next day, after a leisurely breakfast, and a late start that I will explain later*, Tslil and Micha’el (with Ollie) attempted – unsuccessfully – to get their documents signed by a notary. By the time they arrived at the office, the queue outside the door was longer than the staff were going to be able, or prepared, to process before they closed, and so they were turned away, planning to return the following day.

Meanwhile, Bernice and I took Tao to the Lisbon oceanarium, a very impressive campus of two buildings joined by an aerial walkway out into the sea. The emphasis throughout is on ocean preservation and our individual and collective responsibility for that. The principal building has a very large central aquarium and four corner aquariums, each of which recreates a different ocean environment – from equatorial to Antarctic. Each of the aquariums is two storeys high, and the animal and plant life can be viewed from the two levels, representing sea-level and immediately below, and the ocean-floor and immediately above.

The oceanarium is highly recommended, and not only by me. On the basis of customer reviews, the booking site Tiqets holds an annual awards ceremony featuring museums and tourist attractions in nine countries: France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Netherlands, UAE, UK and USA. In 2022, the Oceanário de Lisboa was voted Most Remarkable Venue, beating the other national winners, which included Germany’s Alte Nationalgalerie, Italy’s Duomo di Milano, the Netherlands’ Rijksmuseum and Britain’s Windsor Castle.

We then all met up for lunch in a very nice vegan restaurant 200 metres from the Oceanarium and only 15-minutes’ walk for the kids. The weather was mild enough to sit outside and, apart from one mix-up with the order, which the restaurant immediately rectified, the service was very good and the food excellent. Between the five of us, we sampled much of the menu, and everyone was very happy with their choices.

It was then back to the hotel for the rest of the day. The kids raided the supermarket again, while Bernice and I had enough left over from what we had bought the previous day to have a light supper in our room. Everyone then enjoyed their second consecutive good night.

To be honest, I always enjoy a good night, but Ollie is not the best sleeper, and the kids are chronically sleep-deprived. While we are in Portugal, Bernice offers to split the early shift (late evening and first part of night) with Micha’el. She has a golden shoulder, on which almost all children will fall asleep within minutes. (Raphael, as of yet, appears not to have got the memo about Nana’s shoulder.)

The following day, Micha’el made a relatively early start for the notary – only to discover that, since it was Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras), the office was closed. On his return, we packed and checked out and stored our luggage with the hotel. This meant that we all made our way together to the magnificently-named Pavilhão do Conhecimento – Centro Ciência Viva (Pavilion of Knowledge – Living Science Centre) which is a very hands-on science museum located 100 metres from the oceanarium. The museum came to us highly recommended by friends of the kids whose then 4-year-old had enjoyed a wonderful day there.

We began, at Tao’s request, on the ground floor, at the special exhibition Dinosaurs: The Return of the Giants. This was an excellent one-hall exhibit with a central display of life-size models of a range of dinosaurs, with animated mouths that produced their various roars. The T-Rex was only 20 years old, and therefore had another 8 years to grow, but a ruler stretching to the ceiling indicated the height he would reach every year until he was fully grown.

Around the room were various activity areas, including: a sandpit with half-buried bones that the visitors could excavate with trowels and soft brushes; a microscope with relevant slides and explanations; a wall-mounted dinosaur skeleton puzzle, which the children could assemble from the bones lying around, and several other equally interesting and engaging activities. Everything was labelled clearly and in detail, in Portuguese and excellent English.

From there we ascended to the first floor, which consisted of two very large rooms, each with 15 or 20 activities. We only explored one room, which included very imaginative and fun activities based around such themes as light, sound and mechanics. Children aged from 3 to 10 were having the time of their lives, as were some parents (and, I confess, grandparents). For Tao, the highlight was a complete child-scale construction site, including a two-storey building under construction, foam building blocks, wheelbarrow, a 6-metre tall working crane and so forth. 3–7-year-olds were invited in, issued with hard hats, and put to work.

After almost three hours there, we returned to the same restaurant as we had eaten in the previous day for lunch, then the kids walked straight to the bus station, so that Tao could have the ice-cream that the restaurant was not able to provide, while Bernice and I returned to the hotel to pick up the luggage (our two carry-ons and a laptop backpack, and the kids’ rucksack, three grips, carrier bag and potty bag) and take a taxi to meet the kids.

After another smooth bus ride, and a 50-minute drive from Castelo, we arrived home safe and sound, after a thoroughly enjoyable mini-break.

* Unfortunately, I seem to have run out of space this week, so the explanation as to why our second day started late will have to wait until next week, when I will offer you another, very different, account of our three days in Lisbon.

First this week some quick updates, which are mostly good news.

My cut finger has healed nicely, to the point where I‘m being cavalier with the kitchen knives again – do watch this space for further updates.

Unsurprisingly, in the end I chickened out of braving the China shop lady in the hope of making some exchanges. Bernice has womanfully found a use for the wrong-sized disposable aluminium baking dishes, and I decided to keep my other purchase, which proved to be worth every cent of the ridiculously low price I paid, and not a single cent more. So, a bad decision to buy it in the first place, but at least I didn’t dig myself into a deeper hole by exchanging it for the next model up.

More significantly, last weekend the kids took delivery of a rejuvenated truck, The replacement gearbox definitely seems to be an upgrade, and having the truck back means both that they are able to get to the land easily again and that Tao can go back to his rural gan, after a long period when he wasn’t able to.

Tao resumed his regular two days a week at gan last Thursday, and took very little time to adapt to the new-old routine. He has certainly matured socially over the last year. His month in Israel last November exposed him to a much larger circle of unfamiliar children and adults than he had been used to, and was quite a growing experience for him.

Although his nursery teacher is native Portuguese, none of the other children are (other than her own). They are mostly English speakers, with a couple of Dutch children. After a couple of months of gradual introduction to Portuguese, she has now switched to conducting the gan exclusively in Portuguese, which Micha’el and Tslil are very pleased about. We are also delighted that, with luck, this time next year we will have our own interpreter for the supermarket and other negotiation situations.

Last week included another event: we took Tao to the local library for a Portuguese story-time and related craft activity. This was arranged by his nursery teacher, and included most of the children at the gan, so it was a useful lead-up to his return to gan. Tslil had fortunately been sent a synopsis in advance, to familiarise Tao with the story before the actual event. This had the added advantage of familiarising us with the story, which is just as well, since I for one understood barely a single word of the narration, about a snail whose shell was damaged, and whose friends refused to take her in, but then provided her with her own new shell. Had the story not included friends making excuses that she snored, or sneezed too loudly, with both sounds reproduced by the narrating librarian, I would have been totally lost.

However, that spoken Portuguese humiliation was followed, at home, by a written Portuguese triumph. Bernice had picked out a couple of story books for Tao to borrow, and I was nominated to read one with him when we got home. Fortunately, written Portuguese looks like the Romance language it is. I was able to confidently decipher the title – A Montanha de livrose mais alta que o mundo – The Mountain of Books Taller than the World. (Of course the cover illustration helped to confirm this translation.)

Once inside the book, I was able to keep up a narrative that more or less matched the pictures, was consistent with what words I could make a stab at translating, followed a very satisfying narrative arc, and, most important, engaged Tao. When he immediately demanded a rereading (as he usually does with new books), I was able to embellish the early thrust of the narrative with the benefit of hindsight, and to notice, and incorporate, many details from the wonderful illustrations that I had missed on the first, more challenging, ‘reading’. The only downside of this triumph was that it left me even less motivated to do anything about the fact that I cannot communicate with anyone in Portugal much beyond saying ‘Good morning’, ‘Good late in the day’, ‘Good night’, ‘Thank you’, ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘Pardon me’.

Having spent the last couple of weeks in Israel before we flew attempting to give away, and work our way through, the generous crop of lemons from our barely mature tree, we arrived in Portugal to find that the lemon tree that flourishes in the backyard of the house here put our own tree to shame. This tree holds fruit that can be picked from the lower and the upper levels of the yard, and also from the first-floor balcony of the kids’ bedroom. The trouble with lemons, as I may have mentioned before, is that, while there is no shortage of recipes to be found that use them, most call for ‘two tablespoons of juice’ or ‘the zest of half a lemon’. So, as my contribution to the cause here, I have been starting the day with a cup of hot lemon water, and adding the juice of a lemon to my orange juice at breakfast. I feel a bit like Sisyphus, since I am sure the tree generates new fruit every night, but at least it seems like a healthier alternative to eating my weight in lemon cake and lemon curd.

Being an observant reader (all my readers are surely observant), you will, by now, be starting to wonder about the title of this week’s post. Well, if this were a selfie, you would see me perched in a coach seat, laptop on my knees, as we travel in relative comfort, en famille (six people, infinite luggage, no dog), to Lisbon, for a three-day, two-night city break. There is a story behind this mini-holiday; but then, isn’t there always a story?

Since Ollie’s birth, the kids have been trying to fulfil their legal responsibility as Israeli citizens to register his birth with the Israeli embassy in Lisbon. This is proving immensely difficult, for a variety of reasons that range from the almost reasonable to the utterly ludicrous, but which all have in common a very high degree of aggravation. Let me offer you just a small selection of what is a labyrinthine list, some of whose finer points, I readily admit, escape me, and are too painful for Micha’el and Tslil to try to explain to me again.

• The Israeli embassy in Lisbon is closed for all of the Jewish and Israeli and Portuguese holidays (which leaves precious little time).
• Israeli embassy staff have, in common with Foreign Office officials around the world, been taking industrial action for months.
• The kids are not regarded, under Portuguese (or, indeed, Israeli) law, as married. (They would like to arrange a civil marriage in Portugal, which would make their bureaucratic lives in general easier.* However, the Portuguese authorities require, for this, proof from the Israeli authorities that they are not married. Pause here for a moment to contemplate what a document that states that two people are not married would look like, and how the fact of their not being married would be verified, so that such a document could be issued…..Yeah. Me neither.)
• The Israeli authorities require from the Portuguese authorities a piece of paper that the Portuguese authorities do not issue.
• Even though the entire process of registration depends on documentation, the embassy does not offer the possibility of online submission of documents and registration; it has to be in person.

Enough of this. Anyway, before we came out, Micha’el and Tslil were planning to go to Lisbon to get a notarised translation of the last piece of paper they have been told they need, and then to go to the embassy to register the birth. It seemed to everyone a good idea that they time this for when we would be in Portugal. We could then all have a few days’ holiday, during which Bernice and I could take the children one day while the kids ran around doing all they needed to do.

In the end, this is not going to work out, because of the incredible inflexibility of the embassy, who are now offering an appointment in over a month’s time. At this point, the kids have decided that, if the registration of Ollie’s birth in the embassy matters to Israel, they will let the embassy figure out a way for it to happen that does not involve the kids taking a round-trip of 700 kilometres and losing two full days of their lives. If they can’t figure out a way, then it will have to wait until a time that is convenient for the kids.

All of which means that we are still getting a mini-break, only with less stress. The kids plan to go to a climbing wall. We have received (on Tao’s behalf) excellent recommendations for the aquarium and an on-hands science museum that currently features a special dinosaur exhibit. Tuesday – our last day in Lisbon – is, we now discover, Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras) and we may even get to watch the big carnival parade through the city. The weather is forecast to be warm and dry. Our hotel is in a central area of the city, not too far from the river estuary and with plenty of vegan and vegetarian restaurants. What, I ask myself, can go wrong? (Tune in next week and you will doubtless find out.)

Meanwhile, don’t take my word for it that Tao enjoyed gan this week. And Ollie appears to have enjoyed staying home.

• Bernice has jus reminded me that getting married now will not advance the registration of Ollie’s birth with the embassy, since they weren’t certified as married before Ollie was born.

I write to you as we complete our first, action-packed, week in Portugal. I thought today I would bring you up to date on our news, such as it is. This being Penamacor, rather than, say, New York, life is lived at a fairly gentle pace, so I hope you’re not expecting any particularly exciting news. Having said that, the week has not been without its dramatic moments, as you will soon discover.

We arrived on Sunday afternoon, to discover that Micha’el and Tslil were still, after several months, without a vehicle. On their return trip from Israel in early December, their tender basically died on them. Fortunately, their next-door-but-one neighbour is a motor mechanic with a heart of gold. He diagnosed a faulty part in the gearbox – a common fault with this particular model – and started looking for a second-hand replacement part. ‘Why not simply buy a new part?’ you ask. Excellent question! This particular model of gearbox is obsolete and the part is no longer manufactured.

Having failed to find a replacement part, and knowing that the kids are of limited means, he reluctantly started looking for a second-hand replacement gearbox. Unfortunately, one of the reasons why the gearbox is obsolete is that it was a design prone to failure, which meant that he was unable to find a second-hand one that worked. Not to be beaten, he searched for, and eventually found, a second-hand gearbox to fit the newer model of the kids’ truck. This design is, apparently, much more reliable.

At this point, he came back to the kids, who agreed to pay the (not insignificant) cost of the gearbox. He then proceeded to start fitting it, at which point he discovered that the new gearbox is a different size from the old one and he would therefore have to make some modification to the housing in the tender in order to fit it.

All of this took time and, of course, more money, although what he charges them for labour is more than reasonable, and he is ready to accept that payment in instalments. The bottom line is that they had been without a vehicle for two months before our arrival. There are two other facts you need to bear in mind. First, the road up from the local supermarket to the house is about two kilometres of a 1 in 2 incline. Even the local shops are almost a kilometre away and far below us. Second, supermarkets and shops in the village do not deliver! For these reasons, supplies in the house were understandably low when we arrived.

Fortunately, we had brought some tide-me-overs with us. I’m not sure I could survive any longer without my home-made granola in the morning. Since it is also very popular with Tslil and, especially, Tao, I have learnt to make a supply to bring with us, to buy myself some time before I need to make another batch. We also bring such staples as tea, and this time we brought a couple of loaves – again, to buy time.

However, we arrived to find that even fruit and veg, which are usually in plentiful supply in the house, were very short. We therefore drove to the local super that very afternoon, for a range of essentials. We then took things a little easier on Monday, and, on Tuesday, drove to a larger super some 25 kilometres away, where we broke our own supermarket bill record. To their credit, both Bernice and Tao lasted the course without either of them having a meltdown.

This was quite an achievement since the supermarket was not one whose layout we know well, we don’t have sufficient Portuguese to ask where most items we need are, or to understand the directions we are then given, and we can’t always identify the items correctly even when we are in the correct aisle. To give you an idea of the size of our order, when Bernice eventually arrived at the checkout with the first of our two trollies, the cashier took one look and then called on the manager to open another checkout point.

Fortunately, the season is winter, and so we haven’t needed to try and fit as much into the fridge as we would in June. The weather, incidentally, has been pretty kind to us. We landed in Madrid to be greeted by an almost balmy day. Even when we reached Penamacor, the day was still sunny and mild. With the exception of one day of intermittent rain, last week was bright and sunny, though fairly to very cold. Apparently, November is the rainiest month here, and this time of year is often bright, dry and cold.

I managed two days during the week when I didn’t get to the local super, and I only visited the China shop once. The Chinese manageress was, as far as I can tell, very happy to see me again, although I find her Portuguese even more unintelligible than that of the locals, and her face is stereotypically inscrutable.

Unfortunately, two of my purchases turned out to be the wrong size, and I will at some point have to attempt to exchange them. I am, to be honest, dreading attempting to explain what I want to a manageress who has a poor opinion of human nature and with whom I share no linguistic or cultural points of reference. I may simply decide to put the unwanted purchases back on the shelf, buy the replacement items, and lie to Bernice.

And so to our two dramatic moments, each of which, in its own way, reflects how Bernice and I, each in our own way, are pretty bad at learning from experience. A couple of weeks ago, Bernice returned from a lunch date with a friend to discover that she had lost her phone. Eventually, she returned to the restaurant and discovered the phone on the floor where she had been sitting, directly under her back trouser pocket, in which she had kept her phone, as she always does. Her takeaway from this sobering experience was that she really shouldn’t keep her phone in her back pocket.

On Monday last week, Bernice came back from the bathroom to announce that her phone had fallen in the toilet and stopped working. I confess to being heartless enough to say: ‘You had it in your back pocket, didn’t you?’ leaving Bernice no option but to admit that I had guessed correctly. We immediately buried the phone in a bowl of rice, as one does. We then dug it out of the bowl of rice, removed the SIM, and buried the phone again, in the fond hope that the rice grains would draw out all of the moisture. Twenty-four hours later Bernice found that she was left with a phone that still didn’t work, and a bowl of rice that nobody really felt like eating.

Author’s Note: When Bernice read this passage, she commented: ‘And you didn’t even mention that the only reason I got this phone was because my last one was ruined when it fell out of my back pocket into the toilet!’ So now I have!

Tao was kind enough to allow Nana to share his phone (Tslil’s old phone, on which he watches his daily timed dose of English and Portuguese videos). Her SIM was, thankfully, undamaged. Unfortunately, however, Bernice has never backed up her data, and so she has lost all of her contacts, photos, and sundry notes. In addition, Tao’s phone does not support Yahoo mail, and it is a Yahoo mail account that Bernice uses. This explains why many of you did not receive your usual Shabbat Shalom message from Bernice. She asked me to explain and apologise on her behalf.

Then on Wednesday, while I was washing up, I cut my left index finger on the edge of the cleaver that Micha’el likes to use for chopping. As luck would have it, we bought Tslil for her birthday a whetstone, and, just before we came, she had been using it to excellent effect, sharpening all of the kitchen knives. I stood in the kitchen, watching the blood well up, then grabbing a piece of kitchen towel, wrapping it very tightly round the finger and applying as much pressure as I could with my right index finger and thumb while holding both hands above my head.

As I stood there, I assessed the situation. Because of my irregular heartbeat, I take blood thinner medication daily, which means that my blood takes longer to coagulate. Tslil wasn’t available: she was out walking the dog. Bernice was bathing Tao, and so couldn’t easily and safely leave him unattended for long. Ollie had just woken up, not very happy, and Micha’el was busy soothing him. I was already beginning to feel that I couldn’t keep my arms raised for much longer.

Why, I asked myself, did I seem incapable of learning to take more care when handling knives? I confess that I cut myself these days, while chopping or washing up, with embarrassing frequency, a fact that aggravates Bernice as much as her insisting on keeping her phone in her back pocket aggravates me.

Eventually, I called Bernice, who was able to come in and dress my wound, which is healing nicely, thank you. Not a very dramatic accident, I know, but, as I said above, Penamacor is a very sleepy village. Now, if we were in Midsomer, I might have a more dramatic tale to tell.

And finally, from what we hear, Israel had a worse weather week than Portugal, last week, but Raphael still managed to get out and about between the storms.

Housekeeping 1: Having said, last week, that we did not want to run the risk of catching anything in Zichron, we eventually went up there last Thursday, and spent a lovely time with the girls and Raphael. SInce, by this time, Bernice had a nasty cough, we thought our risk was lessened.

Housekeeping 2: Those of you whose week was ruined by the thought that I missed out on a killer birthday cake from Esther will be thrilled to know that, on Thursday, she produced a magnificent chocolate, toffee, nut tart that even I couldn’t manage two pieces of. Since Thursday was, in fact, my Hebrew birthday, all worked out wonderfully well.

Househeeping 3: A huge thank you to all of you who sent me birthday greetings after last week’s post. This, combined with our Thursday in Zichron, made for a memorable birthweek of celebration.

And now to this week’s post, which comes to you, not for the first time, from somewhere over the Mediterranean. You join me at 8AM on Sunday morning, although my watch says 7AM, since I always adjust it to destination time as soon as we are airborne. It’s very annoying, in my experience, thinking that you are landing in another 20 minutes and discovering it’s actually 80 minutes.

Bernice and I are on our way to Penamacor again, and once again via Madrid, although this time we will go directly from the arrivals lounge to car rental without giving Madrid another thought. Been there! Done that!

We are on what we have been euphemistically calling an early morning flight. Technically, this is an accurate description: we took off, a few minutes behind schedule, at 6:40AM. However, what this means in real terms is that we left the house at 2:30AM, which does not qualify as early morning in any universe I have ever inhabited.

In the end, everything went very smoothly, if rather slowly, at the airport. We arrived there at 3:30, to find a queue snaking through the entire depth of the check-in hall. What, we asked ourselves, are all these people doing here in the middle of the night? Much the same, it transpired, as us, We were initially perplexed to see several people scattered through the queue not only wheeling luggage but also dragging what looked like zippered holdalls for alligators. I spent a few minutes wondering whether these could qualify as support pets. We eventually worked out that the bags held nothing more lethal than skis and other winter sports equipment. (Mind you, on my feet, skis would quite probably qualify as lethal.) There was, indeed, a flight to Switzerland leaving around the same time as ours, which explained a lot.

Careful readers will have noted that the above paragraph began “In the end…” If you are a regular reader, you may have inferred that, as often seems to be the case with us, arrangements did not go entirely to plan. Your inference would indeed not have been entirely wrong. The fact is that, when, in mid-September, I booked the flights, I gave my email address for both of us. As a result, the e-tickets were, I suppose, both sent to my mailbox, in separate mails. I carefully moved the mails, you’d have thought, from my Inbox to a newly-created ‘Portugal Feb-Mar-23’ folder, where they stayed, presumably, until I wanted to print them out last Friday afternoon,

At which point I discovered that one of them – mine, since you ask – had stayed in the folder; the other – Bernice’s (wouldn’t you know) – appears to have deleted itself some time between September and last Friday. I hunted high and low for the email, but, with Shabbat fast approaching, I had to abandon the search, and wait until Saturday evening, when I planned to check us in online.

Shabbat was slightly tarnished by the nagging thought that something had gone wrong with Bernice’s reservation. Perhaps I hadn’t successfully completed booking her ticket, and there had never been a second email! You won’t be surprised to hear that, as soon as I arrived back home from shul after shabbat, I went online on my laptop to check in, only to discover some good news and some bad news.

The good news was that both Bernice and I showed up as passengers. The bad news was that, when I opened my check-in page, I found that several personal details fields had been pre-populated: specifically my passport number and my date of birth. Unfortunately, the passport number was completely wrong and three digits short. No problem there: I quickly overwrote the wrong number. My date of birth was given as 29 January 1953, which, if you read last week’s post, you will know is exactly three years later than my actual date of birth. No problem again, I hear you say: just overwrite it. Ah! But there’s the rub! This entry refused to be overwritten, deleted, or amended, and the handy adjacent calendar icon, when I clicked it, failed to respond in any way.

Undaunted, (well, considerably daunted, in fact, but refusing to succumb to my daunt) I turned to the next field, which was my passport expiry date. This field had been left blank. When I attempted to populate it, I discovered why; it, too, was uneditable.

With mounting daunt, I decided to give my page some time to reconsider, and turned to Bernice’s page. This had, thankfully, been left blank, but proved as unpopulatable as mine had been. Time, obviously, for the traditional solution when confronted by intransigent software – go away and come back again.

After a second identically frustrating experience, I decided to see whether El Al’s Check-In interface worked any better on a smartphone. To my immense, and Bernice’s even immenser relief, the process went very smoothly, and in a couple of minutes I was able to print out boarding passes.

This left us both free to turn to our newly prepared digital checklist for Portugal. Why it has taken us this long to produce one I do not know: we have, until now, been relying on a handwritten list that, after being reused for several trips, is now so full of ticks and crosses in various colours as to be almost illegible.

Now we have a printed sheet of A4 paper, with two columns of Actions and two of Packing. The Actions are subdivided into 3 Months Before, 2 Weeks Before, A Day Before, and On the Day, and cover everything from ordering tickets to cleaning the toilets. The Packing is divided into Sundries, Hand Luggage and Food. Why has it taken us until now, and a chance comment from friends who make a similar trip to America, to realise that, if we have difficulty finding vegetarian cheese in Portugal, then we should take cheese with us?

By mid-evening, we were packed and suppered, the cases were in the car, our sandwiches for the journey were made and the fridge was cleared, leaving the bare minimum for those crucial 50 minutes between 1:40AM and 2:30AM. With only a 5-minute delay while I struggled to remember exactly which safe place I had put my front-door key in a mere six hours earlier, we were soon on our way.

When Hollywood buys the rights to my blog, and comes to film the current post, at this very point the image on-screen may go all wiggly, or, alternatively, an analog clockface may be displayed, running at 2000 times the usual speed. This will, of course, be a device to indicate the passage of sixteen hours…..

…..bringing us to the moment when the door to the house in Penamacor opened, and we were greeted by an excited Tao (but not excited enough to relent at all on his usual rule of “No hugs, no kisses” which may represent the biggest challenge of these four weeks) and a grinning Ollie, who was happy to come to us for hugs and kisses, and who has a sunny disposition that rivals that of his cousin, Raphael.

It is now early Monday evening. We both had an early night, after what felt like a very, very long day, and woke to an unadventurous but wonderful first full day of stories, games, playing in the park, and all the stuff that makes these trips so worthwhile. We have even managed to have a couple of brief grown-up conversations with Micha’el and Tslil. Even the weather is being kind to us: very, very cold – especially when I was walking the dog in the forest earlyish this morning – but bone dry and sunny: in short, a lovely winter’s day.

I leave you this week with a rose between two more roses, the younger of whom appears to have momentarily mislaid his sunny disposition.