The Final Countdown

It's true, I go back to work in 2 days. Five months literally did just fly by. Sigh. I always used to think I was the type of person who had to work - that if I were to take time off I would be bored after a few weeks, just chomping at the bit to return to the labor force! Not true I have come to realize. I may be the type of person who needs to be doing something, but there are plenty of things that fall into the category of "something" that are not work related! Plenty. Those five weeks I had in San Francisco between Africa and Burning Man were so wonderful, I spent my days splitting time between the climbing gym and the ceramics studio (more heavily on the climbing side), with the once weekly foray into the land of personal training. Those were the days!

Portugal was really quite beautiful, and although I never got the hang of the language (at all) I was able to communicate relatively well with the folks there, most of whom don't speak any English. I don't think I ever even pronounced yes or no correctly. I think they appreciated my effort though. Were the dollar not plummeting to new all-time record lows every day I was there, Portugal would actually have been pretty cheap! Definitely far cheaper than Spain and Italy. People like to ask about the highlight of a trip - and while I couldn't come up with one from Africa, the highlight of this trip was definitely renting a car for my last two days and driving around Northern Portugal. I love a challenge!

One of the issues with traveling alone is only have two eyes, which (at least for me) move in the same direction at the same time. So reading a map while driving - especially a tiny detailed road map - is virtually impossible. I would never have been able to drive around Lisbon on my own unless I was just driving without an actual destination. So I decided to rent a car at the Porto airport, and drive into a less populated area of the country. My Lonely Plant guide had a map of Guimaraes, and it looked exactly like the kind of place I could navigate around on my own - there were approximately 4 streets on this map. So off I head to Guimaraes, only to realize when the highway plopped me off into a large city, that the map in Lonely planet was just a small artists rendition of the old historic area, which was who-knows-where in relation to the rest of the rather large city I found myself in with no map. Asking for directions in Portugal? *Not* easy. It reverted to pointing fingers, which is only good for the first street of the directions. Then which way? I was in a complete panic. Each rotary had at least 4 roads coming off of it, and the signage was not useful when I couldn't tell if the sign was directional, or the name of a street... Plus, where do you pull over? The streets are barely wide enough for the two directions of traffic! So oftentimes I had to drive blocks and blocks further than I wanted to before I could find a space to pull over. I miraculously found the hotel I was looking for - the building that said Hotel Toural was huge - but I couldn't find the door. I am not kidding, I ran around a giant block for over 15 minutes trying to figure out how to get in. I asked more people about the entrance to the hotel than I did how to get there in the first place. Finally I found it - there was another building not adjacent to that one which had the entrance. Phew. After that I got an actual map for the city, and it was (not surpisingly) very helpful.

Far more exciting for me than looking at castles, churches or palaces is driving. Driving in a new country where every road is a new road I've never been on before just makes me very, very happy. So off I went the next day on some road trip adventure, across the Northern part of Portugal, and it was so beautiful, a storm was coming in which made the landscapes even more dramatic. The water is a gorgeous dark sapphire blue, they have a number of very cool dams you can just drive across the top of, and many large windmills atop mountains as well. At one point of a particularly scenic part of the adventure Boy George's Karma Chameleon came on, followed closely by Brian Adams' Summer of 69. I was happy as a clam. Are clams happy? Who came up with that saying? I bet Wikipedia could tell us.

So now my adventures are over for the time being, I have transferred all of this blog over to my other one (which no one knew existed) http://cheeksmo.blogspot.com/ and I will try to write every now and again about the mundane experiences of life in San Francisco. I also did manage to get my photos up from Portugal which I am happy about http://www.flickr.com/gp/60211938@N00/2697k2

Thanks for reading along and all of the wonderful comments and encouragement!