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.