Let me start by thanking my many readers who expressed, either in public comments or directly to me privately, how gripping they found last week’s account of my efforts to get my biopsy results before we flew, so that I would be able to get travel insurance. I know that many of you could not believe that we would be stupid enough to contemplate travelling without insurance. What those people are failing to take into account is that in certain situations we are capable of being that stupid, and also that, however fearful I was of travelling with no cover, it was a less daunting prospect than being the one who prevented Bernice from spending a month with the family, and the almost equally daunting prospect of having to break the news to the kids, and the grandkids, that we weren’t going to be coming after all.

However gripping you found the account, I assure you that living through it was much more intense. In fact, when I passed last week’s post to Bernice for her to critique, I warned her that I thought it was a little boring to read. It appears that I was mistaken.

Let me give you one more indication of just how challenging the few days before we flew were, and just what a state I was left in. Bernice and I decided before this trip that the time had come for us to make another concession to our age. The flight that we usually take out to Portugal lands at 21:15. By the time we get through customs, collect our luggage, wait for the shuttle to the car rental office, complete the paperwork, load the car, and attempt and fail to connect my phone to the car’s screen, it is about midnight when we start our almost-three-hour drive to Penamacor.

So, we decided that this time we would find somewhere to stay overnight that was no more than an hour’s drive from Lisbon. I found a hotel that looked fine, and was both reasonably priced (particularly if you are used to hotel prices in Israel) and conveniently situated, just off the motorway we travel on. It was, unfortunately, off the westbound carriageway, but I checked and saw that there was an adjacent exit from the eastbound carriageway leading to a flyover that enabled access to the hotel.

On the evening before our flight, I went upstairs to check in online, print out our boarding cards (Yes, we really are that old!) and car rental voucher and also print out directions from google maps for the drive to the hotel on Monday night and then to Penamacor on Tuesday. (Despite the fact that we take out a data roaming package on our phones, I am enough of a belt and braces man to fear that something will go wrong, and so I always print out directions.) (Yes, we really are that old!!)

When I looked at the route on google maps, I found that the flyover had disappeared, and, although there was an exit from the motorway at a convenient location, there was no way to cross over. We would need to drive an extra ten kilometres on Monday evening, cross the motorway, and then drive ten kilometres back. Worse still, the following morning we would have to drive twenty kilometres back in the direction of Lisbon, then cross the motorway and drive twenty kilometres back.

As you can imagine, this was not exactly good news, and I was not in the best place psychologically to discover it. However, fifteen minutes’ research online made me realise that I had somehow confused two similarly-named hotels, and had booked us into the Flag Hotel Santarém, which is not in Santarém, rather than the Santarém Hotel, which is. It was easy to book a room online at the correct hotel, but, when I cancelled the other booking, I discovered that free cancellation only applied up to 24 hours before the stay begins. Even though I knew that we would not have been arriving until 25 hours later, our booking, of course, was for a room that would be available from 3PM, in another 19 hours.

Bernice and I discussed it briefly, and agreed that we would rather forfeit the cost of the room than add 60 kilometres to our journey. To my surprise, after I cancelled our reservation, I was redirected to a screen that first explained that booking.com would do their best to persuade the hotel to ignore their no refund policy, and then invited me to explain the reason for our cancellation. This I dutifully did, far more in hope than expectation. Fifteen minutes later, I received an email from booking.com informing me that they had succeeded, and our money would be refunded. This was, at that point, so far and away the best news I had heard in some time, that I almost wept tears of gratitude.

When, the following night, we arrived at the hotel just after 1AM, checked in with the minimum of fuss, and almost immediately collapsed onto a very comfortable bed, we were doubly convinced that this arrangement made sense. The next morning, when we enjoyed fruit and coffee in the hotel dining room, and set out well rested around 9AM, we were trebly convinced.

However, we were soon to be reminded that the opera isn’t over until the fat lady sings. As we walked across the hotel car park, we heard and saw a massive explosion about a kilometre away. As a huge plume of black smoke rose, I quickly calculated that the site of the explosion was in the general direction that we needed to travel in. Fortunately, Waze was working perfectly, and, by the time we reached the roundabout half a kilometre from the hotel, and saw that the traffic was already backed up from the site of the explosion almost to the roundabout, Waze had already rerouted us. As we wove our way through minor Santarem streets and then along a country road, we speculated aloud that, without Waze, we would have had no choice but to sit in the traffic jam. Instead of that, we joined another motorway in a few kilometres, and only about five minutes was added to our journey time.

When we arrived at the kids’ home, around 11:15, Micha’el told us that, had we travelled through the night, we would have hit a dreadful fierce thunderstorm. As it was, our journey was through intermittent cloud and sunshine, with some threatening skies but only a little light rain. This, of course, only make us more pleased that we had chosen to break our journey. I suspect that, as long as we take the same flight, Santarém Hotel will be a regular stopover for us.

That same afternoon, a brief storm served to give us a taste of what we had missed. For the benefit of my readers in Israel, this is a short video taken in the kids’ garden. Jealous?

Since then, our weather has improved, and the last couple of days have been hot to very hot (reaching the mid-30s today).

Other than that, I have very little to report. Thanks to the wonders of WhatsApp video chats, even Ollie is very aware of us, and it took no more than a couple of minutes for him to open up to us. He is just at an exciting stage where he understands everything anyone says, but he has a limited vocabulary: limited, but growing every day, and he certainly has no difficulty in making it clear what he wants to convey.

As for Tao, his imaginative play is, if that’s possible, even more sophisticated than when we were last here. He is still as passionate and skilled a builder with magnetiles as ever, and on the mornings when he accompanies Lua and I on our morning walk into the forest, he is always interested in looking closely at the plants and trees, at least when he isn’t forcing me to walk the plank of his pirate ship (which most passers-by mistake for the grassy knoll outside the municipal sports hall).

Bernice, as ever, has switched to an 18-hour day without drawing breath. If you’re looking for an au pair, I can highly recommend her. Sadly, I can’t compete, but I do what I can. Among my less appreciated skills is the ability to accurately predict how many extra large reusable shopping bags we need to buy to pack all of our huge initial supermarket shop. It may be a niche market, but you would not believe how much satisfaction it gives me to guess right.

And so, our first week is over, without our having done anything very much. Not, of course, that doing very much is the object of the exercise. Just spending time with the family is all we really come out for, and the week has been full of that, for which we are both truly grateful.