Off-grid and Ignorant in Portugal

Our path of life is a little treacherous – steep and with lots of places to slip and fall – but the further we go down it, the smaller the drop becomes and the less chance we have of plunging to our deaths.

The recent rain has slid in some complications – as I wrote about last week – but the route is still navigable and we’re confident that reaching the destination is worth the difficult journey.

And thanks to St Martin, this week we took this metaphor literally, packed a picnic and scrambled a tricky track down the cliffs to the beach to enjoy some warm weather and a dip in the ocean before colder weather comes along.

Verão de São Martinho – St Martin’s Summer – arrives in mid-November and is fast becoming one of our favourite times of year.

It’s when the talha amphorae are opened and the first new wines of the year begin to trickle out, when chestnuts are ready to be roasted, and when temperatures in the mid-20s give us the chance to gloat (just a little) about where we live and why we’re doing all this.

I’ve written before about St Martin’s progression from plain old Hungarian Martin, to patron saint of the poor, of tailors, winemakers and curiously both soldiers and conscientious objectors. Oh, and of France.

There’s a Portuguese saying “esta é a minha praia” – meaning that’s my beach, but also “that’s my thing” – and this is definitely our beach.

We call it “The Birthday Beach,” and it’s one of the most beautiful spots along this wonderfully wild coast – if not always the easiest to access.

Ana dusted off her summer sandwich making skills, Daniel threw in some hot tamales and after a sip of beer and a glass of wine we dived into the waves and all agreed the water really wasn’t cold...although we didn’t linger too long.

For the dogs it was the end of an excellent week as Simon celebrated his 12th birthday and Garfunkel enjoyed their joint celebration through meats, treats, some dried chicken and a lot of fussing.

And it was also a great week for us that began in Vila de Frades with a feast of wine tastings, fabulous food, music and friends...and ended with water...coming out of a tap...at the bottom of the valley.

We love inland Alentejo and it was only the coastal climate and of course the beaches that kept us from moving to the winelands when we first drew a line around Alentejo to choose our new home.

We’d been planning the two-hour trip to the November 11th opening of the talhas wine weekend since November 12th last year and this time managed to persuade our friends Niels and Sybille to join us.

Talha wine has its own official classification in Portugal and to qualify it has to stay in its fermenting clay pots until St Martin’s Day.

That’s when the celebrations begin – the taps are hammered in, the songs are sung, the chestnuts (and the pigs) are roasted and the wines are sampled.

And boy were they sampled.

Thanks to the amazing Mauro Azóia and Rita – and the generosity of Hamilton Reis, the guys from XXVI Talhas and the ROCIM Amphora Day we had the most wonderful weekend.

There’s an amazing energy among Portugal’s winemakers and we were lucky to dip into it for a weekend and meet many of the industry’s powerhouses like Hugo Mendes, Gonçalo Patraquim, Mariana Siqueira and many more from Portugal the US, UK and beyond.

Niels showcased his Syrah to the delight of visiting American wine journalists and somehow we both managed to get interviewed for Portuguese telly.

But our adventure to Cuba, Vila de Frades, Vidigueira and Vila Alva began by visiting a weaving mill to choose the oversized headboards for the new lodge bedrooms.

We’ve been to Fabricaal a few times to watch the traditional looms in action, ponder what to order, and also to record for the podcast, but this was the “now we know what we want” pressure trip.

Ana’s eye for colour and style took the lead and I think we have chosen well.

We book-ended the weekend with an amazing late lunch at Quinta de Quetzal and then dipped into Justino Damas Winery where we stumbled across some traditional Cante Alentejano singing last year.

The guys seemed to be winding down after a hectic weekend, but when Ana played them the video she’d filmed last year, they sparked straight up into song again...next thing passers-by were joining in and it was a proper song-off.

I even joined in...albeit a little timidly...

But it’s not been all fine wines and song this week...we also used the good weather to get in amongst it and push a couple of neglected parts of our project.

Not surprisingly there was no sign of the polished concrete floor guys who’d abandoned ship over a labour dispute, but we are reliably informed they will be back in another week to finish the job and clean up the concrete poop/art installation.

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Whilst awaiting their return we focussed on water.

With 6km of plastic pipes delivered from the factory Christiano Santos and his brother Eduardo, turned up to lay a couple of kilometres from the irrigation canal to the bottom of the valley where gravity just about provides it.

They wanted to run pipes along the river, but I thought the bank would be a better option, so got up nice and early to strim down some brambles and make a path for them to run routes for both us and our neighbour Daniel.

It all happened a bit quicker than we expected...and a bit too quickly for us to give timely heads up to the neighbours who were gracious about our lack of communication.

There’s something wonderfully reassuring about having a pipe at the bottom of the valley with a tap to turn on water...one small step for Christiano, but one huge leap for our kind.

Our “dilution over treatment” approach to turning mineral-salted water into drinking water involves two 200,000 litre pillow tanks – one for the canal water and the other for rainwater which we’ll collect.

That involves levelling two 180m2 areas and laying 10cm of sand on top before the pillow tanks can be installed...it also involves putting in other tanks for collecting and pumping the water up the hill.

Enter Charles Days (aka Carlos Dias) with his digger and levelling laser...and apart from being excellently distracted working wonders on Daniel’s land, everything is just about ready.

An expensive week of paying for tanks and pipes pushed me to go through the finances again to make sure all is well.

Surprisingly things are still broadly on track and on budget...barring the occasional surprise from the builder to give us something to argue about this week.

St Martin’s Summer has dried the building site up nicely – let’s hope the concrete guys can come back before the forecast changes.

But the path is still slippy and treacherous in places...and no doubt there are plenty of potholes a little further down the road, but we’re still heading broadly in the right direction.

Life in Portugal is definitely our beach. Especially when we’re on our beach.

Things can change very quickly here in the Valley of the Stars.

The first draft of this week’s despatch began: “This week our dream has really started looking like a fabulous reality…”

By that same afternoon it needed a complete rewrite, and this line needed to be cut entirely:

“I don’t want this to sound like an Academy Award acceptance speech for a film that isn’t done, as we’re far from finished yet, but we are just a little more confident that one day we might be.”

It was around the time I was writing those words that the cement mixer got bogged down in the mud, the polished concrete floor guys went on strike and tonnes of cement started hardening in the truck.

Things had been ticking over nicely and although it was a little later than we expected, the stars had been aligning for the final floors to be laid.

We want a particular polished-concrete look in a sandy, gr-iege colour for all our floors, inside and out, and so had contracted a polished concrete floor specialist to do the job.

Sr Manuel, our main builder, had been playing nicely with them to prepare the surfaces and everything as required – the Moldovan Front Row plasterers did the first layers of concrete flooring inside and Heatpump Paulo had also laid the underfloor heating pipes on time.

Our great friends Becky & Rachel had been staying – full of encouragement and enthusiasm for the project and the podcast, which Pete Emmerson had also been working on many hours a day.

There’d been some rain – we’ve had quite a lot and it’s very welcome (the lake is already very full and it’s only November!)

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We even had a weekend up in Lisbon for our brother-in-law Pasi’s 50th birthday – an amazing whirlwind of fantastic people from all over the world and some incredible food and wine among family and friends.

It was a Big Week ahead, but we were ready – and also gained from a slight delay with the concrete truck which would come a day later than planned to let the land dry out a bit.

When the polished concrete guys arrived on day one they brought a surge of energy and urgency, wheeling barrows of cement from the mixer – sometimes even breaking into song – and then staining and polishing the floors beautifully.

It was after day one when I started writing what I originally called “A Big Week in the Valley,” but then came day two...

“Muito complicado,” the cement mixer driver kept mumbling to himself, as he did circles around his stranded truck.

Arriving late to the scene I wondered why the guys weren’t able to get the cement out of the truck and onto the floors – and then extract a much lighter mixer from the mud.

It became clear the pourers and polishers weren’t doing the pouring bit: they were refusing to wheel cement the extra few meters from the stuck truck. They downed wheelbarrows as it was more than their jobsworth to do it.

Their boss wasn’t here and through some patchy Portuguese eavesdropping of phone conversations, I began to realise this was an industrial dispute.

The idea of the company losing a lot of money in spoiled concrete was apparently part of their leverage – they didn’t want to find a solution.

As the driver said, Muito complicado.

Then things suddenly got even more complicated when the clock ran out.

The concrete was no longer useable in the floors...it was too old...and Mr Complicado started to panic...what was he going to do with his delivery?

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He didn’t want to be the driver returning to base with a useless concrete block for a van, and pleading with the strikers, he persuaded the guys to start passing up buckets of water from puddles to try and stop it from setting.

Our builder Sr Manuel and his guys shrugged – he had no jurisdiction over other contractors and just found it astonishing the polished floors team had felt the need to reverse forty plus tonnes of truck into a puddle just so moving wheelbarrows was going to be easier.

By the time I’d arrived they had tried various things to get it out, but the dispute with the boss had lost a load of time.

With Mr Complicado sweating it, Justo the tractor genius who can take a top off a beer with a huge metal digging bucket (we suspect) gave it a go...but it wouldn’t budge.

Our ever-diligent engineer José added industrial tribunal negotiator to his wide skillset of general problem-solver, diplomat, intermediary and superstar, and was doing everything he could remotely from another building site many miles away.

He also pulled in a favour from the Cow King – our neighbourhood farmer and his mate from the hunting club.

Sadly the King of the Cows got mixed up with where José was talking about and went to the wrong site to begin with.

That’s when I realised the mixer guy needed a lot of water to save his skin...and his truck.

Dragging pipes through the pools of water I managed to reach the van, but then a crushed electrical cable somewhere amid the miles of mud tripped the electricity and the water pump stopped.

I felt like I was in some odd Benny Hill throwback running up and down the hill between pump houses and power stations flicking switches on and off, breakers up and down and then communicating it all to the mudbath men.

By the time António Oliveira – O Rei das Vacas – arrived, the water was running, the concrete was watery, Mr Complicado was more relaxed and I had a very sore back.

“He won’t be able to do it,” Justo said, nodding at the tractor and the depth the mixer’s tyres had sunk into the clay – and Justo is a man used to getting things out of places.

The first attempt ended in failure, but that’s because of all the random bricks and planks thrown into the mud to try and give the insanely heavy truck some traction.

Once removed Sr Oliveira went again, and this time the truck was up and out and everyone was smiling.

Particularly the cow king, who despite having to go out of his way to help us, was delighted to have got one over a bunch of blokes from the city who came to the country thinking reversing a truck into a waterhole was going to end any other way.

Mr Complicado was delighted – he drove off to the factory with a wave and a smile of thanks that gave me no indication of what he was going to do the moment I went back down to our house for an hour-long Zoom call.

“They did what?” I asked as poor Ana, who had risen from her sick bed with a really nasty cold, to deal with the chaos while my meeting was on.

“They dumped all the concrete on our land,” she said.

I went back up...there is was...a huge mass of quickly hardening concrete poop spread over maybe 50m2 like washed out lava in little towers: a hot mud spring frozen in time.

Mr Complicado had turned around, driven back onto the site and emptied his whole truck on the ground.

I asked Justo whether I should try spreading it into bits to make it set in small rocks rather than one solid outcrop...with no nearby shovel, and a worsening back (courtesy of two disks apparently slightly more prolapsed than before this madness began).

He just laughed “it’ll be hard as rock in an hour,” and he was right. I didn’t even try.

Here was us thinking the biggest issue in the whole polished concrete pouring operation was going to be making sure LBD (the Little Black Dog) didn’t spend the evenings tapdancing on it while it set.

So now we have a wonderfully large and unmoveable slab of concrete poop languishing by the place our main gate is supposed to go.

José reassures us it’s not our responsibility, but it’s hard to see how we can force someon…

I’ve always wanted a dog called Eileen.

The delight it would bring every time I shouted out in public “Come on Eileen...Come on Eileen...” would never get old.

Sadly The LBD (Little Black Dog) is a boy, but at least we had Portugal’s first named Atlantic storm to fall back on this week.

It might have been Storm Babet battering Britain, but it was Aline which was too-loo-rye-aying her way towards Portugal this week...same storm system, different first letter.

Or for those preferring an alternative pronunciation, perhaps Aline was making a beeline for Iberia.

Either way we had rain coming for the first time in a while.

And somewhat later than we should have done, we went into batten-down-the-hatches mode and started preparing optimistically for a steady stream of winter storms.

First off was the wood pile.

The last remnants of the eucalyptus forest which inhabited the area where we’re now building has been waiting for collection for a while, and having been baked for another summer was ready to be harvested and neatly arranged behind the house.

I’ve been blaming a dodgy back for putting it off, but with Aline coming, that excuse – like the woodpile – couldn’t wash.

And it was a good reminder to Ana and I of the great thing about having a natural gym on our doorstep - despite the aches and pains afterwards.

Then there was the other woodpile almost covered by brambles: a dense harder wood which will burn better, but needed chopping first.

Enter Erik’s Axe – the splitter axe kindly bought and carried from Sweden by Ana’s brother after a call to arms inspired by reading Norwegian Wood (no, not the Murakame version but by a Scandinavian author…and which has been a bestseller…in Scandinavia at least).

And chopping wood…that is a workout.

We got those at least under cover, if not all neatly stacked, but had no time for the pine.

But that’s been drying for a year and a half and is parked on a wooden pallet, so will have to wait under a tarpaulin until the rain clears and I have recovered from the last round of axing.

We lapped around the house looking for things that could get wet in a storm, made sure the tools were tidied away and the doors firmly shut and readied ourselves for its arrival.

Everything was pretty well prepared by the time the wind speed started increasing – with one exception.

We have some equipment up on the site, too big and bulky to be moved in and out of the new houses as required by the builders, and so it has been languishing on the hill in full exposure to the elements...which had not so far been particularly troublesome.

With a storm coming we invested in some thick black plastic sheeting to keep the rain off the machines and their cardboard boxes (to sit alongside the already well-covered bar) and set about wrapping them up tightly.

But as the storm approached the inadequacy of our preparations became obvious.

The winds were strong – very strong – apparently gusting at more than 100km/h and some heavy rocks and scaffolding frames did as well as Argentina did against the All Blacks in the first rugby world cup semi-final.

They resisted well and put up a good fight, but were comprehensively overwhelmed in the end.

Just before the first wave of torrential rain began, I popped up to check out the defences and they were already breached.

I did what I could, navigating a huge black plastic sail in the quickly strengthening horizontal rain, but with little success retreated to the house to enjoy the spectacle of some proper water flowing down our swales and into the lake.

The first storm is the time to find those little leaks which have widened through the summer heat and let the winter water in...and we found a few.

It’s a chance to see where pools of water are forming, and where strategic digging can direct even more into the lake.

It’s also a reminder of how solar panels need the sun to work as well as usual – something we sometimes forget with 300 days of sunshine a year.

Neighbour Daniel will admit he’s been a little lavish with his ‘lectrics and after two early morning power cuts caused by a new heat pump and a night time dishwash on the first day, (and a coffee maker and microwave used at the same time on the second) he is adapting to off-grid living in the time of rain.

At least he could cancel the water delivery, as his new gutter system was gathering all his worldy flushing needs...for a couple of weeks at least!

The rainfall wasn’t bad...but it wasn’t as much as predicted.

By the time the rain came, the Moldovan Front Row I wrote about last week were long gone: they had packed up and shipped off to help someone else get well and truly plastered.

But just a couple of days later, a Romanian tile master arrived and showed us what speed-tiling looks like.

Hot on the heels of our three week marathon of bathroom redesign we could appreciate the skills of a man who been doing it for 15 years.

His pace was as phenomenal as the plastering crew. Working alone he tiled to the tune of Europop radio and in the blink of an eye had glue mixed, tiles cut, placed and bathrooms quickly covered.

Just to keep up with him we had to race to the shop to collect a truckload of tiles ourselves rather than waiting for delivery, causing even Cassie the Hilux to dip under the weight as I very slowly navigated the dirt road back.

Seeing bathrooms fully tiled is another aesthetically satisfying step towards completion – despite the lack of windows – but that’s also moved on as the PVC guys turned up to take the final measurements and discuss the designs.

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Windows which open in various ways are always a winner, but with wind – and the reminder this week of how strong it can be on top of the hill – helped us to decide on sliding panes to avoid windows taking a battering.

The key is lots of large glass panes with not so many frames in the way of the view, which will be the main attraction at Vale das Estrelas when we open.

The sun is now shining, the power banks and the hot water is replenishing and there’s more rainfall on the horizon.

Hopefully the as yet unnamed new storm approaching as I write will actually bring the mighty number of millimetres my app is predicting.

Come on Aline...2...rye-eh.

It was dusk and we were wandering around the silent building site pondering where to place outside taps when a fancy truck pulled up.

The Little Black Dog (LBD) was transitioning from timid to over-excited (more on him later), and we were surprised: we don’t get people ‘round ‘ere after the sun’s set.

Then a smallish, tough-looking guy speaking Portuguese leaped down from the shiny grey Ford Tracker flanked by heavies and started walking towards us...with purpose, looking around...with interest.

So this was it: the local mafia had arrived, investigating what we were building and how they were going to take their cut.

I couldn’t see any iron bars, but I also couldn’t see their hands.

“Reboque” I was sure he said – Portuguese for trailer – but what did he mean? Were we going to be towed by a car? Was it a threat?

Ana stepped in calmly as he repeated the word: reboco – Portuguese for plaster.

A small difference in pronunciation, but a massive difference in meaning: we smiled nervously, then grinned broadly and then shook their hands warmly.

This was the Moldovan Front Row as they came to be known and they were sussing the joint...ahead of their arrival with machinery and metric tonnes of cement the following week.

This was the legendary travelling plastering team we’d heard about – the fastest plasterers in the west...of Alentejo certainly.

For weeks we had been awaiting news of their arrival. The builders had been concreting and levelling surfaces, the electrician, the plumber and heatpump Paulo had been busy installing, piping and prepping in anticipation of this day.

They had swept into Vera & Joep’s place, mixed and pumped plaster onto the walls with something resembling a fireman’s hose.

They had trowelled and smoothed, sponged and finished their new buildings beautifully and then as quickly as they had arrived they had gone...and the painting work had begun.

Now it was our turn.

Being big lads with broad enough shoulders to swing a bucket load of plaster on one giant trowel they reminded me of a rugby front row.

As the Rugby World Cup in France begins the knock-out stage, we were very glad Moldova hadn’t qualified this year – as these fellas might well have been in France rather than here.

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The front row was where Alan Gledson and I played some years ago, and while neither of us can wield a whole bucket of tile glue on one trowel any longer, we still think we can and so have spent the best part of three weeks attempting to achieve the unachievable.

We set out last month when Alan and Margery arrived to “help us with a bit of tiling” and we are now the proud owners of two fully refitted guesthouse bathrooms.

Margery went home a week earlier but Alan refused to even book a flight back until we were well on our way to finishing.

The first challenge was chiselling out the concrete surrounding the baths – it seems the Germans who built the place erred on the side of caution and cast the cast iron bath in concrete.

When the jackhammering stopped, Alan kept vibrating...for a couple of days...any good rugby referee would have sent him off for a head injury assessment as it was clearly a concussion.

Then we started taking off the horrible white things previously known as tiles with the aforementioned hammer.

With tile chips flying there was blood on the floor and the walls, and then we decided to cut into the brick and install new in-wall showers similar to those in our new buildings.

That’s when we taught ourselves plumbing from YouTube (using PEX or Polyethylene cross-linked pipe), borrowed a bender from the plumber and a crimper from Joep – to link the pipes and connect the showers and sinks. Let’s hope the joints hold.

Thankfully we were able to take notes from the building site to learn how to do it properly before the Moldovan Front Row arrived and covered everything up with plaster so beautifully.

We covered things up not quite so beautifully, installed the new shower base trays and began “a bit of tiling.”

It was tough work – even more so because of the unusually high summer-style temperatures.

Alan did most of the skilled stuff, while I did the measuring and cutting, mixing and cleaning, but day by day the level of finished tile increased.

Then there was the grouting, and Ana switched from working on our main project (and cooking like a demon) to join the push to get the bathrooms finished before our next guests arrive.

Alan worked on the shower screens while I worked out vinyl click flooring – cutting, shaping and placing.

Guido the wonderful German boiler master appeared on cue to reinstall the radiators and get the whole drained water boiler and solar system pressurised and back up and running.

The final act was fitting the toilets, sealing anywhere water might get in...and adding all the finishing touches.

Alan Gledson, you are a legend...a force of nature...a bloody-minded, determined, unmovable machine...and thank you for helping us and for creating two beautiful new bathrooms and for “going Egyptian” to fetch our new bar.

And thanks so much to our generous neighbour Daniel for kindly putting the Gledsons up while they didn’t have bathrooms! We couldn’t have done it without you.

In a fraction of the time it took us to do a bit of tiling, the Moldovan Front Row had pretty much plastered all three buildings inside and out.

They’ll do the last bits this weekend (yes, they work weekends).

It looks stunning, the finishing is beautiful and although it was all the hard work by Senhor Manuel’s guys which got us here, the plastering is the icing on the cake which makes everything look more real and more finished.

With a three-phase power generator, truck-loads of cement mix and a lot of hard work they covered all the floors and walls with their fire hose and then smoothed it all to perfection, prepping for the tiling team who will be coming next.

We’re still a long way from being done – the next juggling act is to bring the underfloor heating and polished concrete guys together as soon as possible, make sure the doors and windows are correctly ordered...and the small matters of the electricity and water infrastructure.

But it’s all heading in the right direction.

It’s hard to know what the LBD has made of all this.

The Little Black Dog is a young puppy with a docked tail who just turned up one day hungry and scared and seems to have made the top of the hill his home...not entirely because he gets fed and watered by us and the builders.

Anyway, he helped me resolve a feeling that I was going slightly mad...

Given that not long ago I thought DIY was something you were cited for in the US for drinking and driving, I’m doing OK, but my biggest problem is spending half the time looking for tools I’ve just left in various places.

Having passed 50 I regularly struggle with readings glasses retention, but pencils, tape measures and trowels seemed to migrate between rooms on their own.

But what made me question my own sanity was the disappearance of the yellow cleaning brush for the concrete buckets.

“Nope,” said Alan. “I haven’t seen it...I don’t even know what it looks like.”

So I bought another one.

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We left a blanket out for LBD, and the next day it was gone. Weird.…

In my experience one should never turn down the offer of a free bar: it’s always fun and it usually leads to new friendships, but of course there can be consequences.

So when I received the message from Vanessa and Jeremy who read this blog and live in Porto, it was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

“We’ve just purchased a small quinta just outside Porto and the previous owners left few pieces behind,” Vanessa wrote.

“It’s quite large, some see possible beauty, some see a large monstrosity, but it’s free to a new caring home. So as requested, I send photos...”

I saw it and thought “wow, that looks amazing...but my wife is going to think it’s hideous.”

My wife saw the photograph and said: “wow...that’s hideous,” but then surprised me, as always, by adding: “we must get it – I have the perfect place for it.”

My eye for interior design is at best short sighted and my stylistic vision similarly blurred, but undoubtedly every eco-lodge needs a sturdy, solid, Brazilian oak, 4m long, German-built, tiki-style bar topped with a suspension bridge.

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It was back in February when we enthusiastically replied yes to the free bar, but with all the ups and downs of the project it was only last week when we finally managed to hit the road north to Porto with the trailer clattering behind us.

With Alan and Margery staying, we had dog and cat carers, and so arranged a few other meetings and planned a couple of nights in a city where I’d never been.

We were just south of Porto last year in Vila Nova de Gaia doing a story and a radio piece for the BBC and for our podcast at Amorim – the world’s largest cork producer.

But I had never been to the city itself and Ana was last there some years ago.

On the way up we dropped in to meet Meterboost – the Portuguese company which makes the lithium batteries we’ve installed in our three-phase power system for the new lodge.

I’m doing a couple of BBC radio programmes on off-grid living and Sérgio Rodrigues’ start-up story from making batteries in his garage to co-founder and CEO, is straight out of Silicon Valley.

More to follow when I gather all the interviews together and get the pieces out on the World Service programme Business Daily in the next couple of months.

Our first stop on arrival in Porto was to meet Vanessa and Jeremy at the quinta, or estate house, they bought and are beginning to renovate.

We’d already bonded by text and phone as they had also left a life of Global Nomad-ness (as Vanessa calls it) to find a home in Portugal...and were embarking on a new adventure with architects and builders.

It’s the most wonderful, classic, creeper-adorned house built surrounding an open courtyard, with lots of little sections reflecting its former life as combined office and accommodation space for a German company.

There are so many things that could be done in so many ways, and Vanessa is overflowing with design ideas, but their first architect let them down and they lost a load of time.

Now back on track, they were keen to have the bar liberated from the pool house, but we quickly discovered that was going to be far more easily said than done.

Our trailer was painfully insufficient both in size and carrying capacity – this was truly a giant among bars.

We’ve noticed German taste leans towards strong, solid and utterly unshiftable, so this clearly needed more plotting and scheming.

Operation Free Bar began its planning stages as we left the trailer parked at their place and manoeuvred our tractor into the narrow streets of Porto.

(Cassieopia the Hilux is a necessity in the countryside, but is a nightmare to park in big cities).

As a huge part of Alentejo’s story, cork is part of our interiors plan – on the mezzanine floors, occasional walls and as fun punctuation marks...and Tony Marques at Corticeira Viking certainly has some great stuff.

This blog once again led us to Tony’s door...via Australia. Phoebe owns The Cork Shop in Byron Bay and next thing she and partner Omar were in the valley as part of their work trip to research cork and meet distributers.

“Tony’s amazing,” she said – and a few months later here we were in his showroom looking at cork stools, ice buckets, bags, yoga blocks, coasters – all sorts of really lovely stuff which we can use for décor and to sell in the little shop we’ll have.

We found some incredible cork flooring, some beautiful wall coverings and even a bath and handbasins made of cork...

Next we headed to the specialist furniture-making town of Paços de Ferreira which we learned about in Nancy Whiteman’s fantastic blog Expat in Portugal which is a great guide to making the move, especially for Americans keen to cross the Atlantic.

But after interior-overload I needed a gin...and to meet another social media pal in real life.

Australian globe-trotter Travis Cunningham has also made Portugal his home and started the Scoundrels Distilling Company in the shadow of FC Porto’s stadium.

Gin was his thing – his Invicta Gin won Gold Medal at the London Spirits Competition and he’s even set up a gin school to teach the art of distilling – but now he’s moved on to rum aged in old Port casks.

I’ll be writing more about Travis and his recent signing for FC Porto in my other much-neglected blog The Big Portuguese Wine Adventure.

Final stop of the day was dinner with Nuno Vargas and family – and their introduction to the famous Porto speciality Francesinha (which curiously translates to “little French woman”).

We met at the legendary CUFRA diner which claims to have a “Festival da Francesinha” todos os dias (every day).

It was timed to perfection with kick off in the FC Porto UEFA Champions League match and three quick Porto goals gave us the perfect backdrop for a sandwich which hardened the arteries on sight.

It was a great trip to a great city, but one issue remained unsettled: the free bar.

Ana spent a couple of full days ringing around car hire companies for vans or bigger trailers, we popped into Ikea and a Leroy-Merlin DIY store to enquire about their vehicles.

Free bars don’t come without consequences and we were deep in planning logistics when our winemaking pal Niels stepped in.

His versatile van wasn’t quite long enough in a straight line...and then there was the issue of how to get hundreds of kilos of oak into the back...but with Alan Gledson in the valley anything is possible.

Niels introduced us to his tractor jack and sending us on our way with a couple of wheel boards, Alan and I began the long drive north.

This time it was all focussed on one challenge: bringing the bar home.

Spanners, jacks and a heavy metal pry bar lay alongside the last-resort chainsaw but Ana’s maths had established it should fit...just...on its side and at an angle.

Vanessa and Jeremy were a little more optimistic when they saw our upgraded van and with the addition of their gardener and his wife, thought it might actually be possible.

With all hands on deck, Operation Free Bar began.

Mallets were swung, pry bars pried, and amid much huffing and puffing we had the 4m piece of solid hardwood half way to the van when the cobbles threw a spanner in the works.

“Right, time to go Egyptian,” Alan said. “We need rollers.”

A CO2 gas bottle from the bar provided the necessary support and with far less faff than anyone (except Alan) expected, the whole thing was secured in the van and the chainsaw remained blis…

We’d been mildly bothering Carlos the building supplies guy for a few weeks about bringing one of his big diggers in to help rearrange a few things.

We’ve had a couple of rearrangements in the valley already and it usually involves setting a site visit, walking, talking, pointing and head scratching, and then waiting weeks for the agreed machine to rock up.

Our most recent bothering was on our umpteenth trip to the tiles and taps place to sort out a still unresolved confusion with the builder over shower and sink hardware.

.Usually-very-calm-Carlos was a little stressed so we light-heartedly nudged him before moonwalking out as he mumbled something about talvez amanhã de manhã (maybe tomorrow morning).

So when a car trundled down the drive at 8.30am the next day, the dogs were almost as surprised as we were (too be fair they’re a bit slow until they’ve had breakfast).

Carlos had sent his digger guy, and after some walking, talking and pointing (and virtually no scratching of heads) he asked if we wanted to start straight away.

We nodded enthusiastically and naively and headed off to the shops.

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Half an hour later we met the big digger delivery truck coming the other way on our dirt road and Mr Digger and his 21-tonne truck were already 3m deep in trenches.

The bigger the digger the harder it is to undo mistakes – once things are done, they stay done – but our new trench seemed to be heading in roughly the right direction.

The extreme gardening was to deal with the large piles of eucalyptus roots which have been languishing on the property’s perimeter since the whole adventure began.

Our first job had been to cut down the eucalyptus forest occupying our flattest land with our bestest view and then dig out the deep roots and either burn them, bury them or truck them out.

We’d opted for burial over climatic impact or cost with the intention of creating a mound of amazing water-retaining soil to feed growth over the next 30 years, but had to wait until they had dried out and reduced by about half the size before digging them in.

That time had come and with a deadline for opening and an ugly fence to bury, there was an urgency requiring a certain level of bothering.

Bothering doesn’t always work here; in fact, it sometimes has the opposite effect.

But not bothering also has the opposite effect, so we are constantly striving for the correct level of balanced bothering.

We are clearly not getting that balance right in a couple of key areas, but it seems the town hall now has the paperwork it needed three months ago and hopefully we will imminently receive our plan for the water infrastructure.

But while I digress, do check out the movie…

Landscaping is an important part of our project and a little vineyard will look great and maybe even make us something suitable for human consumption at some point in the future.

It’s taken me a while, but I have finally accepted the fact there is no way we can plant wine grapes next Spring, as Ana has been saying for months, for a whole number of reasons not least that there are far too many other things to do.

But there are some things we can do , and so the focus for that patch of land is to prep it as well as we can for a Spring 2025 planting.

This involves taking soil samples to see if the area is even appropriate for grapes – even though quite a few people we have spoken to have shrugged as if to say “why not?”

The 3m trenches have revealed our soil profile and it appears to be about half a metre of soil on top of thick clay...hmm.

With that in mind, and a lot of soil improvement to be done, we also need to work out which other machines need to be arranged.

Mr Digger said we’d need a smaller bulldozer to mix and break down some of the clay and rocks, but the options also include disking, harrowing, raking or maybe ploughing with a tractor before planting some nitrogen-fixing greenery...and then perhaps bringing in some sheep?

We were thinking about maybe three sheep to begin with when Alan scoffed and said “you’ll need at least a dozen.”

The Gledsons – Alan and Margery – are back in the valley for a couple of weeks to give us a hand with some heavy lifting.

Alan was a sheep farmer when he was my rugby coach many years ago at Northern and Northumberland, and so presumably “a dozen” might well be a walk in the park for him.

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Our sheep experience is limited to Ana’s parents’ farm in Sweden, and apart from a bit of shepherding and fence building we honestly spend less time feeding them than they do feeding us.

We haven’t even decided between sheep, goats or donkeys as yet.

Some people advise us to start small with one breed of grazers and go from there, whereas others are encouraging us to start a small zoo.

We’re asking the Gledsons for some land preparing advice, but we’re also getting our hands dirty for the first time in a while – and there’s nothing like the unstoppable force of the Alan Gledson machine to get things done.

The project for the next couple of weeks is a refurbishment of the guesthouse bathrooms: switching the old baths for modern walk-in showers, swapping in new water-saving toilets and retiling all the walls.

How hard can it be to remove a bath? Really hard when it’s been concreted in.

Yes, for some absurd reason the bath installation by the German folk who built this place involved building a small wall in the bathroom corner, filling it with broken bricks and concrete and then lowering in a metal bath as it was setting...certainly solid and better safe than sorry I suppose?

My jackhammer wasn’t going to cut it and even after borrowing something far more substantial from the builder, it took the best part of a morning and about six wheelbarrow loads of brick and cement waste before we could consider the next step.

That could be either a ready-made shower tray or non-slip tiles. We’ll need a new shower unit for sure...and while we’re smashing up the walls we may as well move the taps to the side rather than under the shower head.

We’re analysing what the guys are doing in new buildings to make a plan, and while it all seems a little ambitious, what could possibly go wrong?

I might run a book on how long it is before I chisel a water pipe and we get caught up in a vicious cycle of “mission creep” as the military call it.

The one good thing about being rubbish at DIY is it always makes for a better story.

There are many good reasons to visit Marvão – a beautiful fortified hilltop town in Alentejo’s interior - but this is not the place for a day trip from our house.

With a view over Spain, it’s more than four hours one-way, not giving much time for lunch or dinner at the fabulous Mil Homens restaurant, or to stay in the stunning pousada, or to do a sunrise walk around the castle and the town’s walls as we did a couple of years ago.

But in pursuit of a bargain we can do eight-hour round trips, and the purpose of the drive was to meet a second-hand talha salesman.

Talhas are the giant clay amphorae used to make wine since Roman times which I have written about before, and the surge of interest in natural winemaking using these pots has led to some hefty inflation in the informal talha market.

Wine will be a big part of our tourism theme at Vale das Estrelas, and so we need talhas for decoration – and possibly even to make our own wine – so we wanted something rustic for the entrance and something practical for the wine cellar.

It turned out to be not quite as easy as we had hoped.

With the roofs on all the new buildings, the focus of our project has naturally turned to the interiors, and while I’m busy making colourful flow charts for electrical and water infrastructure, Ana is running the administration of the interiors.

As I’ve hinted at before, this includes hours trawling Facebook Marketplace for deals that match the style she’s developing for the interior design.

With an opening date pencilled in for the end of next March we can’t be waiting to gather furniture, ornaments, materials and everything else we’re going to need once the floors are down, the walls are plastered and the windows are in.

Buying through The Facebook needs flexibility and quick decision making, and Marvão isn’t the first place where we’ve dropped everything in pursuit of a deal (but is the furthest...so far).

The other night Ana stumbled across a printers’ table – a large cabinet with many drawers to store the different sizes and fonts of typographic lead letters which would have been assembled on the desk before being delivered to a printing press.

I remember the excitement of the presses rolling at the Newcastle Evening Chronicle where I started out in journalism many years and where typography had recently been replaced by computers.

On the occasional day I produced a story worthy of holding the front page, I would go down to the printing halls minutes after sending my copy over, with the adrenaline of the deadline still pumping, to watch my words being applied to paper and then bundled off onto the streets.

I didn’t quite understand Ana’s vision for where the piece would fit in, but confident in her eye for design (and a bargain) we jumped into the car and headed to the Algarve at 7pm.

It was dark when we loaded the drawers and the cabinet into the car, but on seeing them I understood Ana intended to use the many-partitioned drawers vertically – as picture frames of tiny compartments to fill with colour or ornaments.

And what a great reception desk!

Of course with the acquisitions in full flow, we will need somewhere to store all the new old stuff until we can get them placed in the buildings.

And securing some water-tight cover came into focus as meteorological autumn officially began on September 1st and temperatures behaved accordingly, dropping from the mid-30s Celsius to mid-20s in a couple of days.

We caught the edge of an Atlantic Storm which soaked much of Portugal.

It brought our first trickle of rain in months, and a rush to cover topless Siouxsie the Suzuki and to reconnect the gutters to the depleted drinking water tank.

The days of regular weather app watching have returned – even though rain in September often preceeds a second summer in October (and is good for Medronho Jorge’s harvest as it fattens up the fruit nicely).

But this year things could be different and lots of welcome rain could be coming our way courtesy of the El Niño weather phenomenon, if it does what the experts are predicting it might in Portugal.

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As an aside (and as a geographer) all this climate stuff fascinates me, and The Economist did a great job of explaining El Niño the other week, and commenting on how global warming will amplify its impact.

In short, for us in Iberia it means higher temperatures – and the nearby ocean helps protect our valley against that – but also more rainfall and more intensive rain showers.

It’s what we’re planning for...and why we met Vitor André and his partner last week.

Our off-grid water plans revolve around being able to capture and keep all the storm rain we can harvest from the roofs, patios and solar panels...and that is potentially a lot of water.

With budgets top of mind, Ana’s intensive online research introduced us to Vitor’s pillow tanks.

Anything hard and plastic that stores more than about 15,000 litres of water must be dug into the ground or reinforced by concrete and so the only affordable and practical solution for 200,000 litres is a large plastic bag on a piece of flat ground in the forest.

Bring on pillow tank time.

And the pursuit of storage space with affordability also took us to a large shipping container depot.

We need a technical room for our water treatment station, and inspired by friends Joep & Vera we’ve decided to buy a container rather than build a small brick house to also provide us with watertight storage now and in the future.

They look very stark at the port, but with a coat of paint, a few windows and a shade in front they will be an affordable additional shed on our hilltop...especially for farming equipment in the future.

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Great beds are probably the most important thing we need to invest in for the interiors and we’ve had some top reviews of the mattresses we bought for the guesthouse, most recently from the Lisbon family.

Ana’s sisters are like buses...you don’t see one for ages and then they both arrive at once...well, in the same week at least.

Rita and Pasi stayed a night en route from the Algarve back to Lisbon before Diogo and Valpuri were due back at school.

And Maria João and (El) Nuno enjoyed a couple of nights in comfort after a hard day on the beach without any of us – yet again – managing to catch any fish at all.

The beds got the thumbs up, and while our supplier bought them from the UK – before Brexit kicked in – they are now being supplied from Ireland and are even better.

Just how good the final beds will be is all down to the Excel sheet and the budget...which was helped by Ana’s tough negotiations over the talhas.

Our talha day trip to Marvão included a stop at the brilliant Estremoz Saturday market for lunch and a few extra acquisitions, and took us on to António the clay-pot peddler’s yard.

The price had doubled by the time we got there, but had halved again by the time he delivered the four talhas to us...some days later, once he realised we wouldn’t be paying estrangeiro (foreigner) prices.

The amphorae date from the late 1800s, two are coated inside ready for some winemaking, which we might even try to do next year with some bought-in grapes.

They look great on the top of the hill – at least until we can get them into the wine cellar – bu…

Being in the right place at completely the wrong time used to be a professional blessing, but these days I’m not so sure.

When I was a BBC foreign correspondent, friends would ask where I was planning to visit next so they could avoid going there on holiday because news stories seemed to follow me around the world.

What could possibly happen moving to Miami? (Hurricane Katrina hit there first), or Bangkok? (weeks of violent street protests ended by a military massacre) or Kabul? (Afghanistan was supposedly back on a happy democratic track at the time).

What could possibly happen in Odemira, Alentejo...in a remote rural spot living off the grid, ignorantly?

Fire it seems.

Last year was a huge shock – when fire rushed up the Valley of the Stars burning our land and sending us scattering around with just an hour to choose which worldly possessions to pack into Cassie the Hilux and head for the hills with the dogs.

So when fire came to Odemira again this week...to the southern edge of our nearest town of São Teotónio...and this time was a large enough blaze to make international news, I began to ask if the gods of news might consider leaving me alone now I’ve left the BBC.

The fire began on Saturday – apparently at a picnic area popular for barbecuing close to the main road – and it quickly spread into narrow valleys of tinder-dry eucalyptus forests.

But it was Monday’s strong easterly winds which brought hot, dry air from Spain and drove the fire towards us.

People were evacuated from guest houses and homes as the fire spread out of control and the smoke blotted out the sun. It doubled in size in a few hours.

Dramatic pictures, and a proximity to the holidaymaking spot of the Algarve, gave this story a lot more attention than I expected, and so I was drawn back into the old job, doing live interviews for BBC TV and radio programmes throughout the day.

It’s a popular tourist area in its own right and thankfully our friends who evacuated guests from their Aterra eco-boutique glamping lodge avoided the flames and their place was saved.

Other tourist lodges appear not to have been as lucky.

This week is the Meo Sudoeste music festival – a Portuguese Glastonbury which is held not too far up the coast from us, and for now it’s going ahead as planned.

Fire trucks arrived from all over Portugal, and aircraft have been continuously flying to a nearby reservoir to pick up water to drop on buildings and dowse areas ahead of the fire to try and stop it spreading.

Today we were blessed by calm air, with high temperatures but little wind to drive the fire forward.

Roads are still closed as more than a thousand firefighters spent another day cutting fire breaks with ploughs and trying to contain the flames while they can, and before high winds return.

We discovered an amazing website for monitoring fires from NASA satellite information, but hitting refresh every thirty seconds doesn’t help reduce stress levels.

And so we went out and about to see for ourselves where the fire had reached and which way the wind was going. The evenings here are usually calm and so a big red glow on the horizon soon subsided.

The full extent of the damage is hard to know and the threat is still not over – our friends who breed Lusitano horses are closer to the fire and more at risk from the switching wind direction, but if the fire heads down their valley it will come towards us as well. We are all on high alert.

As we watched the satellite map refresh, we feared for the beautiful Vicentino vineyard – one of the biggest producers of Pinot Noir in Portugal and a place we take all our guests.

We know the guys there well and it wasn’t looking good, until I received a message that they had managed to save both the new winery (which only received its first harvested grapes last week) and the vineyards...by fighting the fire themselves.

The trees and fields cleared to build the winery acted as a fire break and helped protect the vineyards.

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Forty five members of staff stayed on the land to put out spot fires, dousing vines with water and ploughing fire breaks to protect the farm as the fire closed in.

“With the enormous heat, the eucalyptus trees send burning globes 200m and they start new fires,” said Vicentino and Frupor owner Ole Martin Siem who was critical of the fire brigade for a lack of communication between crews and central command.

“I am frustrated because of the lack of action from the fire brigade and the police,” he said.

“There were three big trucks full of water sitting there all day and they did nothing – we were putting the fires out ourselves.

“We asked why they were not helping and they told us they were waiting for instructions from above and could not help.”

“My frustration is with the bureaucracy and the bad management of the fire,” said the Norwegian grower who has lived and farmed in the area for 50 years.

“When you have a large fire you need good organisation at every level, but fire fighters were admitting there was nothing they could do to help us because they were waiting for instructions.”

A lot of firefighters are volunteers and they have been working tirelessly for the last few days.

Crews arrived from all over Portugal to help, but we also heard criticism last year about the lack of communication between different agencies and crews.

When the fire goes into the eucalyptus or pine nut forests there’s not much they can do except to try and direct it into more open areas where there’s less fuel for the flames – and away from houses which are the firefighters’ priority.

Last year we were very unlucky when fire came up our valley for the first time in a hundred years, but extremely lucky we escaped largely unscathed.

Most big fires rage in the interior of the country – close to the border with Spain where the temperatures are a lot higher.

But again we have been unlucky that a strong east wind arrived in those couple of days before a fire could be brought under control.

It’s another reminder for us to make sure our land is cleared of old branches and leaves, that we have fire breaks in place, no wooden decks – and perhaps that we might need to get some sheep or goats to do some of the work for us.

And if we get grazers we’ll need someone to look after them...and that’s when Vasco the Llama comes along. I’ve always wanted a llama, and what better name for him?

You can listen to every despatch where you get your podcasts - here’s last year’s.

Right now we’re optimistic but we’re vigilant. The black plumes of towering smoke are now a misty layer in the distance, but the buzz of aircraft is a constant reminder it’s not far away and there’s always the risk of new sparks.

If it does come closer to us, we have done this before and know the drill: we know what to grab and throw in the car.

We’ll just have a leave a few things out this time as we have an extra three young cats to accommodate (and they don’t currently get on!).

I don’t think this is the new normal for our part of Portugal, but I think it will be a more familiar occurance across large swathes of southern Europe as temperature records are broken and long periods of drought persist.

And thanks to everyone who’s been in touch to make sure we’re OK.

So far so un-fire-…

It was wonderful to be away, but it’s wonderful to be back in the Valley of the Stars – reinvigorated by a few weeks of adventure and ready to plunge back into the madness with renewed vigour.

The builders have been busy while we’ve been away, the animals were almost as pleased to see us as our neighbour Daniel who’s been managing the menagerie solo for a week of torment by Simon & Garfunkel and the relentless Val Kilmer thief-cat and her kittens.

We were amazed to see most of our saplings have survived the summer (so far) and that everything was far tidier than when we left courtesy of our work-obsessed house sitter pals the Gledsons.  

And what a trip – to London, California and Lisbon – to meet up with old friends and family, spending time with our wonderful daughter Oda after too long apart and going on what for us is now a rare overseas expedition.

Jumping on planes was once our way of life, but there’s far too much to do these days in remote rural Portugal and a whole new life to invent.

A wildfire alert the day before our return, the remnants of an aircraft cold and a couple of welcome-home wasp stings didn’t even dent the excitement of being back at Vale das Estrelas.

In summary, we embraced the Barbenheimer weekend in LA, saw two amazing Derek Day concerts, ate “the world’s largest shrimp platter” washed down by Mexican micheladas, tasted our friend’s award winning wine and met one of America’s most Alentejo-obsessed wine masters.

I re-engaged with the journalistic world at a Stanford University JSK fellowship reunion delving into Artificial Intelligence and Disinformation.

We headed up into the high desert to double down on California’s heat wave, and our Joshua Tree AirBnB had a cowboy saloon complete with swing doors, honky-tonk piano and cowboy pool – a theme we extended with a trip to Western film-set Pioneertown.

We ate the best tacos, dim sum and sushi, got our fix of In-N-Out Burgers, went the full lobster while outlet mall shopping and heard ourselves telling everyone how amazing life is in Portugal...and realised just how right we are.

Apart from starting to write a new monthly column in the Portugal Resident magazine (greetings to our new subscribers!) it was a total break – a reset and a re-evaluation ahead of a re-launch as we work hard re: the opening of our eco-lodge in the Spring.

Crazy California is a wonderful world apart from the peace and serenity of Alentejo, but it excites and invigorates us almost as much.

The two places in the world where Ana and I would most like to live are a city of nearly 10 million people and a valley of five.

So this week’s despatch is a window into our old world – the four years we spent living in Los Angeles, our year studying in San Jose and the fabulous craziness of the other west coast we call home.

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And I’d like to begin with an equally unlikely combination: Barbenheimer and the buzz around a double-movie opening weekend which broke records and packed cinemas with people dressed in pink.

Fuelled by memes and marketing, watching the films Barbie and Oppenheimer back to back became a thing and Hollywood embraced it as only Hollywood can.

Oda drove us from cinema to cinema scrambling for the last tickets as foyers ran out of Diet Coke and popcorn jalapeños and rubbish bins and car parks were crammed to overflowing...it was the biggest movie weekend she or boyfriend Derek could remember.

By the time we settled in for our first big-screening in three years complete with popcorn and refill-popcorn, we’d already timed out on the double and would have to leave Oppenheimer for another day.

If you haven’t seen Barbie yet it’s a great film, but in the crazily polarised and parallel worlds of America I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that some Republican Grand Old Party extremists burned Barbie dolls in protest at its “woke” feminism.

Really? Ana follows US politics far more closely than I do, but these are worrying times.

As the New Yorker’s Andy Borowitz put it: “Trump only a few indicments away from clinching GOP nomination.”

At the brilliantly named, dog-friendly bar Boozehounds in Palm Springs, Oda complemented our server on her pink nails: “thanks, I’ve had them done for Oppenheimer,” she said.

It was a rare moment of sarcasm in a country known for its irony-deficiency.

It was so hot in LA we decided to embrace the heatwave and head to the desert – the one place that definitely does really good air conditioning.

I’m not sure what 114 Fahrenheit is in real money, only to say the streets of Palm Springs were mostly abandoned and the city’s hounds – boozy or otherwise – were either wearing booties or were safely air conditioned indoors.

Echoes of the Barbie film’s Ken-dom manosphere were thriving in the Huntington Beach dive bar where Derek Day played a Saturday night set...and set the place alight.

After watching his Classless Act band play in San Diego the week before (and after the launch of their live video recording of a track with 80s early rap icon DMC) it was great to hear some of his original songs again alongside rock classics.

The characters in attendance at the bar included an aging rocker with a black spotted head, pink tambourine man, a grim-reaper look ruined by the guy’s aluminium stick (rather than a black cane), and a gold-lamé outfit-collage was only eclipsed by our friend Susannah’s long sequinned dress.

But it was the cockroach scuttling across the dance floor which gave Perqs the legendary dive bar status acknowledged by the punters spilling out into the street while rocking to the sounds of Mr D.Day. It had everything.

A couple of back to back birthday bashes in London with silent disco headphones and the best British Indian curry ever, some quality time with old friends and some successful wine project meetings made for a great get-away.

But now we’re back...the buildings have new walls, their water and electrical connections are being cemented in and a long line of meetings are already stacking up.

We have water, power, waste treatment and landscaping to resolve, all the interiors to design and build, and budgets to balance...and we hope to open by Easter.

We have a podcast to finish, a load of wonderful pals lined up to visit...and some amazing beaches to remind ourselves of.

But for now our funding is back along with our mojo. It’s exciting, it’s fun and it will only be stressful if we let it.

Let the good times management roll...