Dress day

When the family member who declines to be named and the lovely Jaine invited me to go on holiday with them and MsX to Portugal I knew nothing about the country. We were going to the Alentejo region and staying in a small village in deep countryside.

Jaine told me how beautiful the countryside was and about the abundance of castles and the amazing sweeps of wild flowers everywhere. 

As we drove from Lisbon airport the first thing to strike me were the storks nesting in pylons, reminiscent of creatures in a Doctor Seuss book. As we drove deeper and deeper into the countryside I was unsettled by the absence of trees I recognised, and cork trees planted as a crop, most of them with the first five feet of bark stripped. I didn’t like that. I felt sorry for the trees. But the family member who declines to be named pointed out that I didn’t object to trees being chopped down as a crop. At least the cork trees survived.

I am already bored by this blog post. I don’t write travelogues.

Suffice it to say that I had a lovely time, and shocking as this may be, spending so much time with MsX and her family was the highlight of the trip for me, not Portugal. 

I loved the wild flowers and the river beaches which gave access to swimming and I loved the day we went to the coast. Jaine and MsX and I went in a river in our cossies, but the pull of the waves at the seaside was far too scary to paddle deeper than our ankles.

Photo by Jaine

Photo by Jaine 

And you recall all that fuss over buying a dress so I’d fit in with the female company? I only managed to wear it once, largely because of the chilly weather. We had four warm days out of ten. I even had to buy a couple of fleeces in the local Decathlon because I had packed for sunshine. 

But here I am on the hottest day. In any case, there was no possibility of matching the glamour of my two accompanying female relations. 

Photo by Jaine

I emailed the above photo to Dave, who said he could only recognise me because of my watch and my feet. 

“What about my plait?” I said.

“The dress is so extraordinary it distracted me from the plait.”

“What?

“Well…you wear trousers a hundred percent of the time so when I saw a woman in an exuberant dress and sunglasses like flying goggles the plait escaped my attention.”

“Dave!”

“The feet were definitely a distinguishing feature. It was like trying to identify a corpse by the teeth.” 

p.s. almost forgot…I had never heard of the (Portuguese) Carnation Revolution until the family explained a little of the history of Portugal. Apparently it was a non violent revolution in 1974. I’m going to read up about it. There could be some useful tips.