We arrived in Portugal one week ago, still with my parents in tow. Jude screamed his way through the descent, but the flight felt much easier for me with extra adult hands to deal with him. We have at least five more flights on our adventure, and I will be relieved when Jude’s time on airplanes is completed.

The eight of us spent a peaceful week in Lagos. We searched for shells, explored cliffside paths, browsed shops, and came down with colds.

Along with the normal tourist shops and interesting-to-us grocery stores, we were very excited to find a used bookstore selling only English books! We have really missed having regular access to good old paper books. We have all been reading books on screens during our trip, and a few of us really miss paper. Our kids love to sit down with a stack of library books at home, and sitting down with the iPad is just not the same. Once we have regular access to English books in the UK in February, we will carry what we can. And someday, we will again have our piles of paper to hold!

We celebrated Laila’s eighth birthday a few days after Christmas. Nic and I got to take her out to shop for her own presents (with free babysitting services), and she chose a piece of chocolate cake from a local bakery for her treat. Eight sounds so old to us, and a recent growth spurt has also made her seem like such a big kid.

The Portuguese coastline is an endless string of beautiful (and mostly empty at this time of year) beaches. Miles of boardwalk and trails connect cove after cove of sandy beach beneath crumbling cliffs. We saw a number of people backpacking up or down the coastline – what a beautiful trip that would be! Some rainy weather kept us inside for some of our time in Lagos, but for the most part, we have felt amazingly comfortable considering it’s the dead of winter! The huge expat population here obviously enjoys the mild climate as well. Our shorts and short sleeves have emerged from their vacuum-sealed cocoons – yay! The sandy beaches come with the unfortunate mess of sand, yet another less-than-welcome travel hazard given the lack of dryers and my lack of foresight in booking a few lodgings without a washer. We will have to try out a Portuguese laundromat soon, but when they come connected to a grocery store and run while you shop, I don’t think it will feel so inconvenient.

Hoping to see some powerful waves one day, we drove out to Cabo de São Vicente, an end-of-the-earth place where the Romans believed the sun sank into the ocean each night. We saw only gentle swells on a calm day. Locals drop fishing lines from the top of these sheer cliffs – crazy!

Daily life goes on with mundane tasks like haircuts. Jude got his first buzz cut. I’m not a huge fan of the look on him, but it’s funny to keep asking him where his hair went and to watch his reaction.

Before taking my parents to the airport, we explored Faro for a few hours. We finally tried some delicious fresh orange juice you can squeeze for yourself in the machines we’ve seen in every grocery store. Pick a container, push the button, and you get some amazingly fresh and local OJ. My mouth is puckering now just thinking of that tangy juice! The kids also got a kick out of the healthy peacock flock residing in a local park.

We will be in Portugal until mid-February, so it’s time to step up our Portuguese! I feel I can understand a decent bit of verbal and written Portuguese with my Spanish background, but my impulses on pronunciation are wrong. At least the language is much more familiar than Dutch or Albanian. I am enjoying listening to some instructional Portuguese when I have a chance. Many people speak enough English for our Portuguese to be useless, but we still strive to be polite and know some basics.