Wait, nope. It's Madrid Day first, which is hard to fathom because I have woken up very hungover and confused as to where or what I am. Dan reminds me that we came to Spain, and tries to joke with me about the hilarity that was getting me off the airplane and into the airport shuttle, but my blank stare confirms for him the incredible breadth of my previous night's drunkenness. I laugh it off and maintain I was not drunk at all and am just normally stupid, but he is not fooled by my lies, because when he suggests we go on a walk to get coffee and see the sights, I say, "Sure!" and forget that I hate walking or doing anything at all before 10am that isn't staring at the wall and wondering if the purpose of life is to love one another or destroy each other totally.
Or drawing dick pics.
We go on a walk to enjoy the sights of Madrid for the few hours we have before our train (or 'tren' in Spanish because I am very worldly now) but we have given zero thought to what to do in Madrid, so we just decide to walk to the train station so we know where it is later on. This makes perfect sense to me because my hangover is robust enough that it is entirely possible to me that the train station could move in between us finding it this morning and needing it later, so it's best that we triangulate its position and keep a beady eye on it.
Luckily for us, on the short walk to the station, the sights of Madrid find us, rather than the other way around.
Glorious.
It is a rainy day that is reminiscent of home, so we conduct ourselves like regular Portlanders by pretending we don't care about the rain but secretly wishing we had any of the umbrellas that every single person in Madrid carries.
Dry, cozy idiots.
We are pioneers and travelers, and the lack of umbrellas does not stop us from enjoying our morning, nor does it make us stick out like sore thumbs dipped in water when everyone else is enjoying not being drenched in the cold.
This seems normal.
My intense hangover prevents me from being upset at all the walking, which is good because at some point we get incredibly turned around and end up walking back by our hotel to find the train station, which apparently was right across the street. Dan apologizes for going the wrong way, and I make burbling noises and try not to throw up on his shoes, so we call it a draw for who wronged who and enter the train station to make sure we know which train to take later on.
Take the first palm to Main Street
and then transfer to coconut.
I sometimes consider what I might find in other countries, but rarely do I think I might find a jungle inside of a train station. Madrid decides that instead of letting me enjoy sweating profusely and wondering why I am alive (to drink more, I think) that it will blow my mind with an ENTIRE JUNGLE INSIDE OF A TRAIN STATION.
It is humid. It is warm. It is a jungle inside of a train station. Honestly, I can't describe it any other way.
We return to our hotel so we can pack and ready ourselves for our trip, and all at once it dawns on us that we are intensely hungry. Though our hotel includes breakfast, the man who is serving it seems very upset that we might want food, so we venture out across the street (not to the train station) to eat a place called Casa Luciano, which one review described at 'regrettable' and another said 'horrible, not advisable at all.'
This seemed perfect for our station in life. I describe Casa Luciano as 'honestly not that bad when the lights are off and you can't remember what happened anyway' because despite the fact that the place is questionable at best, they gave us a plate of ham and eggs on top of french fries.
The equivalent of giant boobs and inability to see her face.
I order some sort of sandwich because my ability to order things in other languages extends to skillfully ordering sandwiches, unless I'm trying to actually order sandwiches, in which case I end up with omelettes. After eating, we pack up and bid goodbye to Sleep'N Atocha.
It is train time, and because Dan is operating on the level of Not Able To Speak Much Spanish and I am operating on the level of Probably Dying But Hard To Say, the train station feels like more of a to-do than is generally the case at a train station. We stare at our tickets for a very long time, but for some reason all the words are in a different language and we are not quite certain what they all mean. Dan tells me it is up to me to ensure we get on the right car for first class, which I say is just fine, because I long ago learned not getting first class on a train was like asking if you can sit on the floor at a movie theater, like they'll let you do it, but why? There's a chair right there and it's really nice and no one else can have it if you want.
So when we get to the first car and I ask the train conductor for Preferente and he says 'Si' and points to the car we're at, it all feels a little suspiciously too easy, but I go with it because I have no ability to not go with it. We stuff most of our luggage under the little luggage cage, except for my giant piece of Very Heavy Clearly American luggage in which I have put six pairs of shoes, because what if I want a lot of shoes? I guarantee that I will wear none of these shoes, but when you pack two hours before you have to leave, the thought that crosses your mind is, "What if people in other countries wear more shoes than we do? Should I bring more shoes? Am I a person who needs this many shoes? I think I am a person who needs a lot of shoes."
A deep, soul-searching piece of knowledge from this trip is that I am a person who does not need many shoes, but I am a person who needs Dan to move a lot of shoes. He uses his Dan Strength to pick up my absurd piece of luggage full of a closet of a shoes and puts it overhead with many Spanish businessmen looking on, wondering what the actual fuck could fill up a piece of luggage that large, and I resist the urge to shout 'ZAPATOS, CABALLEROS' and instead pick a seat at random and sit in it.
Dan asks me if we have assigned seats, and in my shoe/hangover stupor I tell him they do not assign seats on trains. He tilts his head at me with the face that I now know in our affianced state means "You are very cute but wrong about many things but I can see part of your boobs so I'll go with it" and I pull out Sandwich #4 which causes another head tilt because at this point the sandwiches have been in my backpack for a day and half with mayonnaise and no refrigeration. This does not matter to me because I have heard Europeans don't refrigerate things so I am only disgusting for eating day-old sandwiches in America but very cosmopolitan in Spain.
The train ride passes without incident.
And with many beautiful sights.
Until people start getting on and off the train, and I realize that people do, in fact, have assigned seats. I panic and grab Dan's phone to check what our seats are. It says 3B and 3C, which I'm sure I've seen nowhere on this train.
Except here, right next to us.
I tell Dan that we somehow miraculously sat exactly in the right train car, in our right seats, with really no indicators to any of that. He nods sagely and says, "Well, you're a Zollenberg now, so get used to things like that," and I punch him and say it's probably more likely that he's going to trip on sandwiches that are far past their date of needing to be eaten, but facts are facts and we just luckily happen to be sitting in our seats.
I decide that nothing more exciting will happen to me on this train, so I fall asleep for the rest of the ride.
I don’t shout this on the plane, because I am an adult now and know that shouting things make people think there’s a fire and that is how you get kicked off a flight in midair for sure. But it is Iceland Day, and as I wake up and shoot a last glance at Window Lady, who I still hope trips on her way to baggage claim (have an inconvenient day, bitch), I realize Dan and I are touching down in Iceland. This is a strange feeling, because Iceland is only the place where my favorite show is from, which is a kid's show called Lazytown where all the kids just eat donuts and a hot man comes to show them how to do jump splits and they just keep eating the donuts and watching him do jump splits because what ELSE are you supposed to do in that situation, your own jump splits? Forget it.
Sometimes he does regular splits and sings songs.
Top of my Celebrity Hall Pass list.
We deplane and end up in the Iceland airport, which I realize has campaigned super hard near Portland because it IS Portland, and is full of artisan chocolate and artisan people and artisan sandwiches. I ask if we can have any of these things and Dan says we already have artisan sandwiches made by an artisan person (Dan) so we head over to the first class lounge because we are now on the Fancy People leg of our trip.
I told Dan on the flight that the only thing I wanted was to go to the first class lounge and have some pancakes, but then I remembered we were going to Europe and therefore pancakes mean something different, which is sad pieces of flour paper and not the hearty flapjacks of American lore. So when we arrive and I see pancakes, I am skeptical, but it is 11pm our internal clock time and 6am local time, which means my stomach is a freshman college girl ready to believe anything anyone tells her.
I'm the best you'll ever have, baby.
Here’s the thing: these pancakes ain’t wrong. These are officially the Best Pancakes Ever. They are dense, they are chewy, they are fluffy, they are perfect. If these pancakes were an ass, they would be Jessica Alba in Sin City, CHAPS ON. After inappropriately succumbing to orgasmic pancake ecstasy in public, whereby Dan asks me to please conduct myself appropriately in the first class lounge, I tell Dan to try a pancake and confirm that they are R-rated and should not be served in public and maybe also try to do a jump split. He says they are the best pancakes ever but also I should calm down and stop making the other business folk uncomfortable and also no to the jump splits. I say PANCAKES I AM HAVING MROE and he goes back to doing regular Dan stuff while I stuff my face with the best pancakes ever and onlookers try to avoid my glassy drugged-up pancake stare that is normally reserved for people who are smoking crack or smoking crack and realizing it's actually really good crack and they better buy more before it all runs out.
Dan reminds me we have a nine-hour layover in Iceland in which we’ve decided to go to the Blue Lagoon. We succumb to the touristy nature of the venture because honestly we do not give a fuck and there is no better way to spend a layover than in nature’s giantest bathtub. For some reason, the internet screwed up our reservation and said we were going to the Blue Lagoon on July 7th (probably because European dates are the worst) but the very nice people in Iceland don’t care how much we are changing our journeys and let us go wherever we want and do whatever we want and, contrary to all of my Icelandic TV show viewing, eat as many donuts/pancakes as we want.
We get on a nice bus with WiFi, because everyone in Iceland has WiFi, which is impressive for a volcano. What is not impressive is literally everything else about their landscape, but I have a feeling they know this because every ad they have they throw in some ponies, which is like sprinkling gold dust on your dinner, you know it’s just a piece of chicken but now it’s CHICKEN CON GOLD.
This seems nice.
Iceland is not chicken con gold. It is mostly rocks.
After fifteen minutes, we see some blue steam rising above the rocks, and I point it out to Dan very calmly.
“DAN THAT STEAM IS BLUE DAN LOOK IT IS BLUE
HAVE YOU SEEN BLUE STEAM DAN DAN DAN BLUE STEEEEAM"
He says blue steam is cool.
We are happy that we booked at 8am time for the hot springs because we have heard they are very touristy, but one thing that is universal with tourists is that they do not do stuff before 10am unless your plan is to never sleep and start hallucinating. This means for two hours, we have a pretty empty hot spring that is milky blue and relatively deserted. Also hot. ALLEGEDLY. I assume I am the first person who has ever visited a hot spring ever and tell Dan I will confirm the hotness of the spring. Dan, who has lived in Montana and maintains he has been in many natural hot springs says of course they are hot, but clearly he does not know because I am the first person to visit a hot spring ever. I tell him I will let him know if this is true and then I get in and the water is in fact hot and I am impressed. I tell Dan he can also be impressed and he does not answer me because he is busy being Dan which is normal and used to hot springs.
JUST A REGULAR DAY FOR DAN I GUESS
I bring my phone to the springs because it seems this is the Done Thing, and after a few pictures, I realize the Done Thing sucks because we are in a goddamn pool and carrying your phone around sucks.
Am I an Instagram celebrity now or
do I need to actually use Instagram
I run back to the locker room and throw my phone away, and when I return to the hot springs I instantly regret this because Dan agrees to wear a silica mud mask with me and now I have no way of capturing it for all time. He puts it all over his face and I put it all over my face and chest and we are finally the perfect depiction of the White Family, because we are literally covered in whiteface. I consider retrieving my phone to recreate the moment, but instead here is an accurate representation of Dan's face:
After a few hours, we decide it’s time to go back to the airport, and we prepare ourselves for our journey, only to the have the bus driver tell us he will not be returning to the airport for another hour. This is hard for us because we were planning to return to the first class lounge to drink until we had to leave, but we are well-seasoned travelers used to changes in plans, so we go back to the Blue Lagoon cafe to drink there instead.
The cafe only has weird liquor and dried haddock, and as we are one alcoholic and one Jew, we congratulate ourselves for making the Right Choice.
Party in Iceland and Only We Are Coming.
Finally, we notice that is time to go and we head out to the bus. I see the bus driver running down the Blue Lagoon path and recognize the face of a man who needs to poop badly, so I prepare myself for a long wait at the bus stop. Dan rubs my arms vigorously to keep me warm, because it is fucking cold in Iceland, for some reason (if only there had been some context clues, honestly). I mention he can rub my chest if he really wants to keep me warm, and he says I have been watching a lot of Batman Begins. I say clearly I am just very good at survival skills but he does not rub my boobs to keep me warm, and I loudly reconsider our relationship. He offers to continue feeding me, so I decide to stay with him.
We re-arrive at the Iceland Airport, ready to kick it in the first class lounge again. Because Dan’s life is blessed, the entire food arrangement is smoked fish and deep-fried shrimp. I mix a cocktail that tastes like garbage and it is so overwhelming that I decide to spend the rest of my time in the delightfully comfortable lounge sleeping. Dan says please don’t sleep because we will probably miss our flight and I say that is a him problem because clearly I am the type of person to miss a flight so he needs to save me from myself.
The saintly Dan stays awake while I snore in the middle of a public place.
Not what I meant when I asked Dan
to take photos of me on this trip.
Eventually, we decide we need to leave this lounge because it is the Garden of Eden, full of smoked fish and coffees and cocktails and we will never leave unless we make the jump. So we leave the lounge to get to our gate.
Nothing is happening there. We realize we’ve made a huge mistake.
Until some ridiculous children start making hilarious sounds next to us. I am on their wavelength because I am kind of drunk and sleepy and there is no reason to be standing in line for a flight without making ridiculous sounds and/or crying hysterically. We start making fish faces at each other, and then popping our lips, because we are standing in line, and what the fuck does one do in line but entertain oneself with one’s own facial sounds?
Kids just get me.
We board the plane and immediately fall asleep. Did I mention this leg was first class and everything was super fucking comfortable? I probably did not, but this leg was first class and everything was super fucking comfortable.
Dan, in his inimitable Dan wisdom, recommended that we fall asleep for an hour and a half in order to beat jet lag. He probably slept for that length, while I slept for way more than that time and then grunted and flailed every time he mentioned I should wake up. Eventually he manages to wake me, and I immediately order gin and tonic and Campari because we are fancy and also it is very free and then I immediately order another and the very sweet flight attendant doesn't speak perfect English so she says, "Another?" and I say yes another and prepare for a delightful flight.
She's probably right to ask.
Dan, unhappy with the prospect of another sandwich, orders cured fish on a plane, like a madman.
I, too, like to live dangerously.
Somehow, by this point, I've ordered many drinks, and according to Dan, I am very drunk. I tell him I am not drunk just very excited to be doing sky stuff and he says we have landed and also to hold it together because we have to navigate customs. But it is Spain and we are well-versed in Spanish customs, which basically means you walk through the door and you're in the country and maybe someone waved at you when you walked by, but probably not.
We magically teleport to the center of Madrid, where we are staying at a place called Sleep'N Atocha. It is adorable and amazing probably but I am now admittedly quite drunk so I tell Dan FOOD NOW PLEASE and we wander down the street to find food. After a few minutes, we pop in to a place which I do not know the name, but this guy greets me.
"May I get you a drink?"
A giant octopus on the wall who looks like he will pour me a beer is always a welcome sight, and we order lots of food and wine. Because I am drunk and can only partially claim to know how to speak Spanish, and definitely can't claim to know how to read English or Spanish, we pray whatever words I say turn out okay.
Look, food!
After gorging on delicious food items and drinking all the wine, we stumble back through the streets of Madrid to pass out in our cute little hotel room, because I've achieved blackout status.
This is how I stumble out of sleep and disturb Dan’s industrious activities, which include making seven sandwiches while I do nothing, because we share our lives equitably.
Vacation Day means that we are finally setting out for Spain by way of Iceland to celebrate my 30th birthday. No matter that my 30th birthday was in January and I have effectively been 30 forever, I am finally living my childhood dream of when I tried to change my birthday to June because January is a garbage month in which to have a birthday, seeing as how Christmas has just happened (something that does not matter to Dan) and it is cold and terrible and you want to bring cupcakes to class but you’re six and somehow have seasonal depression already.
So my birthday is in June this year. Presently, in fact! If you forgot to wish me happy birthday, now is your chance. Do not fuck this up.
Vacation Day is particularly exciting because we have somehow nailed the best itinerary in the entire world. We do not have to be at the airport until 12pm for a 2pm flight, and we are flying on a Wednesday afternoon which means everyone else is working instead of doing the decent thing, which is patronizing the Iceland economy. Dan and I float towards PDX on a cloud of superiority and land at The Country Cat, because we have eschewed all of our earthly possessions to Icelandair and now need drinks.
Yes I will accept your bucket of liquor.
We drink and I eat a salad because I am under the impression that I will be healthy for this flight. In fact, I am under the impression that I will be healthy for the duration of this trip. I tell Dan that we will be having pushup contests every day, and by pushup contests I mean I will drink wine while telling him to do pushups and then throw cocktails at his head when I ask if I’m fat and he asks if I want the truth or the much fatter truth that could have been regular truth if she spent less time drinking and more time doing pushups.
The time comes to board, and I ask Dan if he knows anything about Icelandair. My knowledge extends to the fact that they say they can let you live in Iceland for a while if you fly with them, which sounds like when sailors would Shanghai people and say, “You said you wanted to go sailing so I brought to China also do you want to build some stuff also it’s not an option please remove your pants and get to work.”
I did not read any books to support those statements.
Dan says he does not know what Icelandair is like, so we settle in to our slight drunkeness and hope it’s enough to carry us through a 7-hour flight. We board the plane and sit in row 27, and pray to any god listening (he picked Jewish god, I picked god of the hearth in any denomination, they’re usually not busy at this hour) that no one takes the middle seat between us. After about ten minutes of plane boarding, we hear the most beautiful words known to man:
“All passengers are boarded and we are preparing to depart.”
And the unthinkable happens.
NO ONE IS IN THE MIDDLE OF US.
WHAT IS THIS HEAVEN ON EARTH AND ALSO IN THE AIR.
In fact, no one is really in the back of the plane at all. Because when one thinks of planes, one thinks of flying to New York and London and places people want to go, and very few people consider that a flight on Wednesday morning from Portland to Reykjavik might not be full.
Here is a pro travel tip: Wednesday flights to Reykjavik are not full. People are not going to Reykjavik on Wednesdays.
I immediately kick off my shoes and burp really loud to claim my space on the plane. Dan says none of that is necessary because we literally paid for these seats and they are ours now but I am not convinced, although I stop short at peeing on the seat. I mean, has anyone seen an empty middle seat in years? Who knows what the etiquette is for keeping it these days? Nobody. It’s the Wild West and adverse possession laws apply. But I keep my pee to myself because Dan is old and wise and strong and could probably knock out anyone who wants our seat with no claim to it.
We eat a couple of Dan’s seven sandwiches (one for each ocean? I’m not sure why there are so many) and decide to watch Three Billboards Outside Ebbings Missouri, because it is classified as a comedy on Icelandair. Dan maintains that it is not a comedy, and I maintain that maybe it is because people are hitting each other and that is funny, but they are not hitting people in the funny way. When the movie concludes, Dan says he is floored by the movie, that it is is a wonderful representation of how forgiveness dominates in the worst of situations. I say the movie is about how nothing matters and people are dust and everyone is terrible and small towns are very lax on arson laws so we should consider moving. He says we are not moving just because people will not investigate arson in smaller towns and also he’s really tired of having this conversation stop it Roxanne it’s not happening. I tell him I thought getting engaged meant we shared each others’ interests but FINE WHATEVER. No arson.
I bet these clouds would let me commit arson.
Our next endeavor is navigating jet lag. Dan maintains that our friend Will has guided him well to beating jet lag, and that means sleeping on the plane. I tell him I read something that says you should stay awake for 48 hours and start hallucinating a little and then you're hallucinating which is fun and cool. He tells me that we can both test our theories, and I chicken out and decide to take a nap.
Or at least I would have loved to, except the woman across from us was born from an egg and had never seen a sun before, or so I assume because this bitch would not stop opening and closing her window shade to look at the sun. OPENING AND CLOSING HER WINDOW SHADE ON A FLIGHT WHERE EVERYONE WAS TRYING TO SLEEP BECAUSE WE WERE LANDING AT 6AM LOCAL TIME.
I blurred out her face but I wish I had blurred out her life.
I grow murderous because Dan tries to avoid her terrible behavior by very cutely trying to cover his head with an airplane blanket, but the blanket is probably covered in semen and only one of us is used to that sort of thing. Eventually I sit and stare at the woman, and Dan’s Roxanne Sense kicks in which is when he realizes I’m operating outside the laws of normal human behavior. He asks what is wrong and I say I am considering shooting a blowdart into that woman, only I don’t have blowdarts so probably I’ll just throw my whole body at her. He says I should not do this and I say I want to tell her she sucks and he says we are on a plane and if she wants to admire the wonders of a plane that chases the sun towards the North Pole that is her right. I make a note that Dan is a saint and also check to see if I have anything to sedate him with so I can murder the woman anyway.
We wake up in paradise, aka the Douro Valley. I am struggling to comprehend that I am actually here, because my favorite joke in Portland has always been that one day I will go to the Douro Valley and drink all of their port. Now I am here, and ready to drink all of their port, so I figure that I am some sort of magical witch woman who can wish things into existence by saying them in jest. I tell Dan I would like a pony JUST KIDDING, but the joke is so painful I tell him I actually really want one, we can put it in the kitchen.
He says we should get breakfast instead.
Free things!
What I adore is the return of the Plate of Ham, which is a staple in both Spanish and Portuguese cultures. I made that up, but it's definitely a staple in my culture, which is the culture of enjoying entire plates of ham. The entire trip Dan and I have been trying to consider how it is possible to smuggle an entire leg of Iberico ham back home, because it is so delicious and so cheap. I tell him it is easy, I will put the leg under my jacket, and when the customs officers stop us, I will tell them it is my service animal, and I will look so crazy holding an entire leg of ham that they will have no choice to believe that I definitely need help, and if ham legs are what keep me from serial killing, well, it could be worse.
Dan is not certain that will work, but I am not listening to him because ham plate.
Hello, my pretties...
A little about Quinta do Vollado: it's fucking awesome. We are uncertain how we ended up in Portuguese farm-to-table paradise, but we discover that the majority of food that is offered is from their own gardens and farms. So every morning there is fresh goat cheese, fresh eggs, fruit from trees that you can pick yourself but they do it for you anyway. They tell us there is a garden and that we are welcome to traverse any area of the quinta (which is what they call the winery, way cooler word than winery) and any part of the vineyards. They strongly encourage us to visit the orange groves. I am having trouble listening because I have never seen an orange grove before in my life and I am certain orange trees only exist in books.
Or maybe over there.
After a sumptuous breakfast of hams and fresh cheese, we decide to go back to the room. This is because we made a funny mistake when we were booking our hotel, and that mistake was forgetting to book our room for the entirety of our trip. Somewhere in Lisbon we discovered our mistake and then were fortunate enough to find ONE room left for the day that we were technically homeless, and we booked it. That room was in the new wing of the hotel, which was fancy and pretty and brand new, created by a Portuguese architect that I think owns the quinta, or something.
The wall is a door. THE DOOR IS A WALL.
After breakfast, it is drinking time, in our lovely room where there is a complimentary bottle of wine waiting for us. Despite bottles of wine being 1 euro at the grocery store, free is still better, and so we take full advantage.
GET OUT OF MY PICTURESQUE TABLEAU, HEATHEN.
Ah, much better.
I berate Dan for trying to obscure my pictures with parts of himself, because everyone knows that pictures are not for people, they are for landscapes and food only. He ignores me and drinks the wine straight from the bottle, because we are fancy people who do fancy things. Then he settles in for some serene book reading, and I settle in for a nap.
Real book.
Fake nap.
OR I WOULD HAVE, but we are on the most absurd chairs to have ever been chaired into existence. At first glance, they appear to be gentle hammocks of chairdom, a fusion of two things that are amazing (hammocks and chairs). But much like the hot girl at the library whom you are instantly attracted to because, hey, hot girls and books, but then realize she was only there to steal your Adderall, we are equally attracted to these chairs only to find they are a goddamn clusterfuck of insanity.
First of all, to even get in this chair, you have to carefully waddle backwards like your ass is a dumptruck trying to negotiate its way into a very small parking space. Then you have to try to squat lightly so as to not drop yourself heavily into the chair, because if you do, it will flatten out, and instead of sitting, you are now lying down flat, or lying on the ground because you fell out of the devil chair. Then, once you get yourself into the fucked up contraption, you have to try desperately to not move, lest the chair start leaning backward, and then instead of sitting you are now laying down.
If laying down is the end goal, the chair succeeds. But it is a very bizarre experience, like the first time you have sex and soft, awkward white arms are trying to lay you gently backwards, but you're like dude we're doing this standing up, I don't like you that much, and then after five minutes you leave. Much like that very hypothetical scenario, Dan and I give up on the chairs and go to find better things in life.
These things are good.
This is also good.
We exit the new wing of the hotel to visit the 18th century manor house. Quinta do Vallado was once the home of Dona Antonia Ferreira, one of the most famous port houses in Portugal, and her direct descendants still run the quinta. The Ferreira family eventually sold to a bigger company, and then reopened their ancestral home as Quinta do Vallado, focused on making table wines rather than port. I find this to be fucking blasphemy, but I forgive them because they actually do still make port, and also I've been drinking for weeks and am in no position to judge anyone on anything.
As such, despite my intense love for history and old things, my other intense love for drinking by a pool leads us to, well, the pool. We ask one of the hotel staff if we can have a bottle of wine that we will take with us over there, and she says, "Oh, shall I bring it for you?" and I say yes, yes beautiful bastion of all that is right in the world, yes you shall. She does not speak good enough English to identify whether those are words she should be offended by, but as with everyone in Portugal, she gives me a confused a smile and backs away slowly. I am starting to think it is less a Portuguese trait and more just a reaction to myself that causes this, but I do not dwell on those thoughts because our foray into Pool Land has led us right past the gardens.
Poppies: farm-to-table opium.
I find they were not kidding around when they said they grew their own vegetables, unlike in other places where everyone has a "roof garden" but they won't show you what's on the roof because it's "unsafe" and "ma'am please you are not allowed back here." Quinta do Vallado does not fuck around with that American bullshit, and encourages you to stroll leisurely through their gardens and poke everything with a stick. Every tree is an orange tree, from which you are free to grab a piece of fruit and indulge in all of the earth's bounty. I do not trust these trees, because my mother told me there is no such thing as a free lunch, so I'm certain if I accept their oranges I'll probably have to go back to their apartment and "do stuff."
"Ever done it in a raised bed?"
Dan instructs me to stop being suspicious of inanimate objects, and we finally make it to the pool, which actually is a rather long walk, but completely worth it because POOL!
Where does it end?!
And not only is there a pool, but there is a delightful bottle of wine sitting right where I totally want to sit, which is next to the bottle of wine.
Hello, new best friend.
We get to work on the arduous tasks of drinking and sleeping. We congratulate ourselves for taking on this monumental hardship so that no one else has to. But eventually the strain of carrying the burdens of the world become too much, and we wake up and go back to the hotel, because it is basically dinner time, and by basically I mean it is a time of day in which I would like to be eating.
Quinta do Vallado has a lovely option of purchasing a four-course meal of standard Portuguese fare and all-you-can-drink Quina do Vallado wine. It is the greatest deal known to man, and because Dan is a smart man, he made us a reservation that we presently attend.
Being in Europe, I convince myself that European glutens are different than American ones. In fact, it is probably gloutens over here, so I help myself to some delicious bread and olive oil that is made here at the quinta. I am happy with my choices and look to Dan for approval, only to find that he has made himself a majestic and beautiful plate of bread that looks nothing like mine.
The plate of a man who knows how to be happy.
I HAVE OTHER SKILLS OKAY
I glare at him, because he is a plate artist who constructs plates that look like people would want to eat off of them, and I am a garbage artist who piles garbage in front of her and then consumes it like some sort of garbage-eating lamprey. I once again concede that if he were not feeding me I would be living inside a can of beans, literally inside it because I probably got stuck trying to scoop them out and then just accepted my fate as a can lady. He tells me that is not true because he does not date losers.
Dinner consists of multiple courses that come with multiple wines. The wine lady is a lovely person named Cristina, who, in typical Portuguese fashion, is extremely reserved when she visits our table. She begins pouring me a dry Muscat that is the most amazing white wine, and I effusively tell her, "Yes I love it! I had it last night!" Which prompts her to pull up short and say, "I will get you new wine."
NOOO!
My American exuberance nearly deprives me of my favorite wine, so I make a note to stop saying any words ever, because I am bad at it and have failed multiple times to communicate. Cristina pours me my wine, although with extreme skepticism because she is an astute woman and can tell she probably should not give me all the wine I can drink. Then they bring the first course, which is fresh goat's cheese and salmon on top of amazing oranges, and then something else that I don't remember because I was drinking all the wine nervously, and nervous drinking means excessive drinking.
It's like a sandwich or something?
For dinner, there is cod, because the Portuguese love cod. Cod is not native to Portugal, but so the story goes, the Portuguese sent some explorers to Nova Scotia, and they came back with cod, and the Portuguese were like YES THIS FOREVER. But of course cod does not transport very well, so all Portuguese recipes calling for cod are actually calling for salted cod, which makes for delicious, salty, bizarre food experiences, like this cod that is in a bread soup with an egg on it.
We also have veal, because veal is delicious.
Babies taste better.
We drink much delicious wine that all comes from the quinta, and dessert is so good that I fail to take a picture. It is thin orange slices candied in port and baked or drizzled in the fucking blood of angels, or something makes it taste insanely transcendent. We drink the 10 year old tawny port bottled basically next door, and then amble back to our room where I assume we pass out from happiness, but I can't be certain because, you know, wine.
Dan and I awake on Day 3 and enjoy our final amazing breakfast at Valverde Hotel. The time has come to leave behind our angelic hotel staff, with their maudlin inevitabilities of never leaving their home town, and their sweet optimism about finding love with the hot fado singer in the lobby. I try not to cry too much into the pool, because this place is beautiful and amazing and all the buildings look like giant cakes.
I think this one is blueberry.
But, as the saying goes, all good cakes must come to end, so I pack my razor and my hair ties and prepare to leave Valverde behind, to find our place in the Douro Valley.
Not before leaving a parting gift.
I decide it is polite of me to leave behind my old hair tie, to give Portugal a gift that they know nothing of. A relic from another land, where things are, perhaps not better, but different, at least when it comes to the ability to keep hair off of your head. The mystery continues for me, because Portuguese women have these bountiful heads of hair, and sometimes I see them tied back, and I just wonder do you have to make your own hair ties or what? I haven't seen a place to buy strips of leather either, so maybe it's all just prize scrunchies here. Who knows, I certainly don't, and given our new journey we are about to embark on, I also don't care.
Side note: When we were at cooking class, I was regaling everyone with my absolutely fascinating, not at all ridiculously boring tale of how I spent the entire day looking for a small bit of elastic instead of giving good regard to a country full of wonders both natural and man-made. Margo said, "Oh, why don't you ask Kaitlyn? She always has a ton." My eyes snapped right to Kaitlyn's wrist, where, sure enough, there was a veritable treasure trove of hair ties encircling her arm like tiny hugs of joy. Sweet darling of heaven that she is, she offered me one free of charge, even though I felt compelled to tell her that the going rate is 0.50E.
Save the capitalism for America.
The point of that side note is now laden with two hair ties, Dan and I are realizing we're running out of room in our luggage. But that's okay, we are about to get a car! And then it can carry our things for us.
We have a plan perfectly laid out: we shall call a taxi, pick up the car, come back to the hotel, load our things, and be on our way. Confident in our ability to put tasks in an order that makes sense, we ask Fernand to call us a taxi to the car rental place. He looks surprised and says, "But it is such a short walk!" I trust him implicitly, because our hotel angels would never do anything to lead us astray. Dan mentions when we walk away that it seems like the walk is twenty minutes or longer, but I say that they said short walk, and if those sweet paragons of virtue and goodness at the front desk say it's a short walk, it's a short walk, dammit.
Dan says that Google maps says it's twenty minutes. I say that is probably shorter time on the metric system and before he can tell me that is not how that works we are off walking, the opposite direction up Avenida da Liberdade than we have usually been going, that is to say, up the fucking hill.
"For the millionth time, no, you will
not die from walking."
FINE. It is a short walk, everyone in Portugal knows this, so we press on, Dan keeping a pace that makes me suspect he secretly hates me, also known as 'normal walking speed.' It is warm, and the cobblestones are out in full force, and we are going uphill, so I pray to the gods of laziness that this all ends soon.
We pass by a Hertz rental center. Our place?! We consult the map and it does not seem to be so. I try not to fling myself at the Hertz like the last woman against the last man in a bar after all the other men have been like nevermind, I guess I prefer loneliness after all. But at this point we honestly have no idea where our rental place is. What we do know is that we are standing at the beginnings of another hill, with no way to know if our things are beyond it. To compel myself to move forward, I pretend that we are fleeing the Inquisition and that if I don't walk up the hill I will be caught by Catholics and tortured. But then that sounds nice too, so I am stuck deciding what I would prefer when Dan has the sensible idea to just walk to the end of the block and if we cannot find the place we'll grab a taxi.
So we walk another ten minutes and I continue to ponder Inquisition torture methods and whether walking was one of them until we finally come to the conclusion that we just have no idea where we are or what we are doing. We double back, consulting our map the whole way. I figure this is a good time to actually check street signs, which is very difficult in Portugal because they are only on the side of the building, and most of them are very poorly kept, I assume because the Portuguese don't really care if they ever get anywhere, life's good anyway.
I pop over to the other side of the street and look for the sign we need, and return back to Dan, whereby we discover the Hertz is actually the rental company we're looking for, even though we rented from a different company and there are no indicating factors on the building that it is what we're looking for, except for a small, so small sticker set far away from the door saying that is where we're supposed to be.
Hertz is a black bird shitting all over my heart.
There is a brief celebration as we high-five over our unerring skills of locating, comparing ourselves to dolphins and Batman, or at least I do, at length, while Dan goes to get our car.
He finagles an automatic in a country of standards, because he is awesome and good things always happen to him. I am pleased that he was the negotiator instead of me, because inevitably we would have ended up with some sort of airplane and I would say but I am not a pilot and they would say well you ordered this and I would say no I ordered a sandwich, seriously, what is the Portuguese word for that? But we procure instead a BMW that has a GPS and Bluetooth capabilities, which was my only request so that I could blast The Lumineers and fado music interchangeably.
Perfect for any road trip.
By the time we get our car, it has been more than an hour, much longer than the less than an hour we were expecting. So we get on the road, and it is a terrifying experience for me because Portugal does not seem to have any discernible traffic laws that we can suss out, having eschewed turn signals for sheer intuition. Lisbon driving is a delicate ballet between all the drivers who seem to know exactly who to let through and who to not, of people gunning their gas and pulling up short to wave through a pedestrian that they saw three miles away, switching lanes at seemingly ridiculous moments but being yielded to, and I have no idea where the speed limit signs are. Which means that driving in Lisbon, you need Counter-Strike levels of paying-attentioness, or you will accidentally go through the rotary at the wrong wave-through and get squished like a Portuguese banana.
Only sometimes a good thing.
Dan, of course, is just good at doing stuff, so he maneuvers us back to Valverde like he's been co-driving with Lisboans his whole life, and I pretend like we're not driving in a city-wide death trap. We get back to the hotel, load up our luggage, and say goodbye to Lisbon.
Elijah rides bitch.
For some reason, we were under the impression it took five hours to get from Lisbon to the Douro Valley, but it really only takes three.
Just enough time for a detour.
Our first choice seems a little ominous, so we decide to stop in Sintra, which is a quaint little seaside village full of house-cake confections and lots of castles.
Another good place to put a castle.
Two things become apparent in Sintra:
1. The class system made it possible to build these amazing structures in improbable places, because when human lives are not valued, who cares how many hills you send them up with how many stones?
2. It's not a seaside town.
I will take this moment to say that I have tried tirelessly to procure a guidebook on Portugal, but only after I already arrived and the possibilities were next to zero to do so. Therefore much of my knowledge of Portugal is based on a general idea of what the country is shaped like (a rectangle), and historical fiction in which Portugal might be shipping over a princess to marry the hot English prince but he just wants to be freeeee!
So, you know, more than some, less than others.
It is the exact opposite of the way I usually travel, which is to research heavily the entire plane ride over and land with a good understanding of where I am and what I should be doing. This, on the other hand, has been a singularly strange experience, to be in a country with no knowledge of the language, culture, sights, amount of hills, and location of the ocean. It is like you are in middle school again and all of the things you have learned in life are no longer true and you're wearing the wrong things and saying the wrong words and having absolutely no idea any of those things are true until days later when that weird look someone gave you finally slides into place and you realize ohhh, it's because they thought I was a fucking idiot, well that makes sense.
Which is how I came to think Sintra was a seaside town, because all of the buildings were high up, and the only reason to build things that high is if they are on a cliff, probably overlooking the ocean. But they are not on cliffs, they are on hills (of course) and we are going to climb those hills because looking at things from high up is how you enjoy yourself in Portugal.
The iron maidens were under construction.
Happy fortunes mean Eric and Margo and their family are in Sintra the same day as us, so we all plan to climb the Castelo dos Mouros together, because every experience I've had with a Moorish castle has been varied and unique. I am of course kidding, they are all very high up and require a lot of walking and one would think at this point I know myself well enough to know that hanging out at the bar at the bottom is a much more unique experience, but learning is not the theme of this trip. If it were, I would have consulted Wikipedia for this picture and noped right the fuck out of there.
There's a bar at the top too, right?
Instead, I yep right the fuck up there, following my feet in the hot sun to take this picture.
Majestic.
We waffle around in the sun at the top of the Moorish castle, because the alternative is walking down, and that just seems like a lot to ask. I read a plaque that says the castle was not defensive, it was just a lookout, so the Moors did much as we are doing, which is just standing around and staring, hoping that's all you have to do for the rest of the day, I guess. I imagine the Moors had more turnips and shit to snack on up there, which would have been a nice treat at the top of that godforsaken hike, but very little looks edible.
Pretty sure feral cat is a delicacy here.
Hungry and confused, I begin my dubious descent down the castle steps, which are made for people much more adept at movement than I am. I wonder how anyone wearing jerkins and boots could even maneuver on this, but maybe back then their feet were not as big as mine. I consider that maybe pitching myself off the top of a staircase would mean I would not have to walk down, because either I would bounce to the bottom or be dead.
Either way is fine.
Though both seem like valid and very adult options to pursue, three children and three other adults are making their way down the steps, so I figure I am able to do so too. We reach the bottom and ask Eric and Margo what they are doing, and they say they are visiting the palace that was the first thing I saw and took a picture of on top of a hill.
I say a silent prayer for their walking souls.
Dan says the single most beautiful words I've ever heard, those being, "We're going to get lunch instead." With a song in my heart and a sandwich on my mind, we head back to the car and continue our journey.
Our plan had been to get lunch in Sintra, but the insane warren of hillish backstreets upon which many a tourist has parked means that there is absolutely no place to put our new BMW, so we drive out of town and toward the Douro Valley along some highway. About ten minutes outside of Sintra proper, I see a parking spot and a cafe, and we quickly stop for some food.
It is essentially the recreation of our experience at O Beny's, only this place is called Blitz Cafe. I make a note to never enter anywhere with a B in the name again. This time I have my stock phrase (falas ingles?) and employ it handily. The girl looks at me and says, "No."
WELL FUCK I DID NOT PREPARE FOR THIS EVENTUALITY.
I say the only words on the menu I know, which are 'ham and cheese sandwich,' although that once got me an omelette, so I pray it does not happen again. Dan seconds my order, and she says, "Two?" and I nod and she stares at me like I'm an idiot, so I keep nodding, because that always fills people with confidence about one's intelligence. She shrugs and puts the order in, and then we get this.
That's two sandwiches, twice.
What happened here, I like to believe, is that this woman saw the desperate look of hunger on my face, and realized somewhere, somehow, Portugal had shorted us one sandwich (possibly in exchange for an omelette, which is no exchange at all). And as such, it was her honor-bound duty to supply us with enough sandwiches, commensurate with the looks of tragedy and idiocy crossing my face. Dan, who always looks normal, got one sandwich. I, who looks like PLEASE FEED ME all the time, got three.
I ain't even mad. I fucking love sandwiches.
We eat our tostas and get on the road. Time is a'wastin' and we have a Douro Valley to get to.
If Florida and Montana had a baby.
I try very hard to stay awake, but that seems like a bad idea, so I fall asleep instead. When I wake up, Dan is struggling desperately to not kill us by falling asleep at the wheel. We think some coffee is in order, but given our failed experiences everywhere that is not a city proper, we are uncertain about pulling over in a small town to find an espresso.
It eventually becomes a physical necessity to pull over though, and fortunately there are along Portuguese highways little service areas that are right on the road and do not necessitate actually going into a town. We pull off, and don't even need to use any of our terrible Portuguese to get by, because there is this magical robot available.
Tell me what you desire, I'll pee it out.
Robot excretions in hand, we get back on the road. After lengthy discussions wherein I force Dan to unpack every poetic implication of every Lumineers song, we come upon the Douro Valley.
To describe coming up on the Douro Valley is like trying to describe a particularly good piece of chocolate cake. You can't do it. Why? Because your mouth is full of cake. But also because it's just brilliant, beautiful, unimaginably vast and surreal. So here's this video instead:
