The everyday routines of this community and our travel lives... I’ve had people marvel at our willingness to give up the comfort of our routines. But in reality we don’t. We experience new things every day, but we have the daily things too.
Every morning Joe stretches and reads yesterdays news (we’re eight-hours ahead of California). Then he puts in his earbuds and cranks up the motivational video and works out.
Every morning I go straight to the window and open it. I lean on the window sill and stare at the bay. Sometimes this is cut short by the flock of birds nesting nearby. They go into attack mode. Joe finds this highly entertaining. He sticks the flyswatter out the window and taunts them. They look like competitive fliers, like the Blue Angels or something. Their aerodynamics are amazing.
I carry my coffee to the couch and play Wordle, Strands, and Letterbox. Then I wash the eggs and Joe makes eggs and ham for breakfast. Every other day we walk to the street gym to meet his friend Antonio. I sit at this café and write either my current work-in-progress or this blog.
You may not know this, but I have degenerative disc disease. I worked out on the street gym a couple of times, but it flared up my nerve pain. So, I’m sticking to my tame workout. Every morning, I work out—gently. I’ve done this for as long as I can remember.
Every couple of days we walk either the beach or the boardwalk to Salir do Porto—the neighboring town. I love being part of this community’s routine of walking the beach early in the morning.
Up on the promenade the business owners wash their store steps and windows for the day.
The jet skiers and kayakers drag their gear down to the waters edge and stand in the water talking before they start. The fishermen either set out their lines from the shore or they paddle out to their boats and head out the mouth of the bay. Cafes start filling up with the coffee and croissant crowd.
Once a week, I do a puzzle with my friend, Theresa. We have an app on our phones on which we can do the puzzle together while we chat.
Joe and I often sit around reading for an hour or so, then we’re off and running. There are 129 steps to our condo, and we do that a couple of times a day. We walk up to the big grocery store, stop at the open market, and pop into the butcher-shop every couple of days. The other day we accidently timed it for when school let out. We walked with hundreds of teens for several blocks.
There’re two churches in this town with church bells. First one chimes out the time, then thirty seconds later the other one chimes out the time. At 12:03 the tsunami warning blares out its practice warning—noon is a bit noisy around here. We have several places we sit and watch this little bit of the world walk by. At about 3:00 pm (15:00) our phones start dinging as our friends and family start waking up.
I frequently walk by Maria’s swimsuit shop. She always has a happy smile and a greeting for me. I finally decided to get a suit from her yesterday. She is truly a professional. We discussed my problematic body and then she started loading my arms with bikinis. The one I liked was the most expensive, of course. I was so disappointed. She took pity on me and discounted it a lot, so I bought it. In case you think that was impulsive of me, I’d budgeted for that before I left home because I’d seen her shop the last time we were here.
In the afternoon, we both take naps. Well, I try but usually unsuccessfully. Joe’s a master at napping. Then we head back down for dinner or just a glass of wine. I make dinner several nights a week and pick out a movie to watch while we eat.
So, you see… our lives are fairly routine even when we travel.
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