First Nice Day

After 20 days of sweltering heat in Tavira, Portugal, we had our first nice day:  daytime temps in the mid 70s, with a lovely breeze that had a little nip to it coming in from the sea — this only a day or so after Congress, with its obscene Kavanaugh confirmation, declared that it was fully prepared to go to war against a majority of citizens who live in the United States.

What this vote demonstrated is that McConnell and his dotard friends, along of course with the useful orange idiot, are prepared to put in place a legal and legislative framework — backed of course by the physical and economic power of government — to ensure permanent, white minority rule in America by any means necessary.

Frankly, we had not planned to spend almost 2 1/2 weeks mostly sitting around doing virtual bongs in an apartment, due to a forbiddingly merciless sun in a cloudless sky — with temps in the 90s every day making it extremely unpleasant to walk around, while dealing with all the tourists here.

After a while, you start to dread them, no matter which nationality.  In Tavira, the streets are paved with slippery smooth old cobblestones, and while that may look picturesque, these can be quite hard to navigate on an uneven sidewalk grade chockfull of waddling fat German and British and French visitors — on streets with no shadow from the sun.

After a while just stepping outside seemed like having gone to a sauna and stairmaster workout (especially with the 200 foot climb back up a hill to our apt) and we got so absolutely sick of it we stopped going out and I just shut down this blog out of frustration at spending so much time and money trying to find one place in the world that we can call home and not feel like Paul and Ingrid in Casablanca.

But with the weather in Tavira since mid September insupportable, as the French say, frankly this morning we were ready to pack it in and take a 45 euro plane ride to Nice — as we had just about had enough of being trapped in this gilded cage of an apartment, with no way of getting around without being completely drenched with sweat after 10 minutes of being outside unless we took cabs and tuk tuks everywhere.  Word to the wise:  do not come to Tavira before mid October, just to be on the safe side in terms of broiling heat.

But finally this freak heat wave — which is probably normal weather here — broke and we were able to walk several miles this afternoon. like young colts finally freed from their paddocks, to the salt pans of the Rio Formosa and escape from most but not all of the degenerate fat old foreigners who choke up the streets of Tavira so badly you want to scream at them to go back to wherever it is they came from.

The pics of this walk that you have seen so far were taken with my wife’s S8+, and have a more natural color.

The next batch are from with my el cheapo Cannon, and the colors are way off so I must have inadvertently pushed some Enhance Colors setting without realizing it.

I wish I could name all the plants — with wonferful names like sea lavender — and birds we saw but go here and you will have some idea of the beauty of the area, and what kind of gorgeous and unique fauna and flora can be found in the Ria Formosa, where we spent much of the day, with a fresh salty breeze blowing in from the Atlantic, keeping us cool and full of energy as we took it the beauty of a less commercial, and far less crowded side of the coastal Algarve.

Next week, my wife and I will be returning to Florida — having failed to find a compelling reason to jump ship to the Algarve. Way too many complications and uncertainities in that regard.

In the end, moving here only really makes sense if you are mega weathy and are willling to play various unsavory but legal games to save a packet on taxes on your global income streams, or if you are just some sort of run-of-the-mill  buy-to-let EU or Chinese real estate speculator/money launderer type.

Last time I looked, we most definitely fit in neither of those categories.

Otherwise the place is just too darn hot, most of the time, and the pleasures of being a lah-de-dah expat American might soon wear thin in a foreign country where isolation and irrelevancy would most certainly be two of the more dominant elements of one’s life.

Besides, there’s still a war against the forces of white, geriatric, male fascism to be fought, and the heat of that coming battle is rising by the day.

What’s we’ve seen so far, unless I am very wrong, have only been minor skirmishes.