On the Road Again…

What It’s Like to Live in Portugal

We’re back in Portugal.

And this time, we’ve arrived carrying considerably less of our lives with us.

Last year, Carla and I somehow convinced ourselves that hauling fifty-pound suitcases, along with carry-ons, over cobblestone streets and on and off trains and buses was a perfectly reasonable way to travel through Europe.

It wasn’t.

There are few things more humbling than dragging an enormous suitcase uphill on cobblestones while watching someone stroll past you carrying a small backpack and looking suspiciously happy with their life choices.

Lesson learned.

So this time, we brought only what we really need - perhaps even a little less than that. Two bags each, everything manageable, and nothing requiring the assistance of a small forklift. It feels wonderfully liberating.

There’s something satisfying about realizing how little we actually need to live well. A few clothes. Comfortable shoes. Our phones and computers. A camera, although in my case that happens to be the phone. A few personal things.

And off we go.

We spent the previous three months back in the States, moving between Asheville and Nashville and spending time with family and friends. It was wonderful to be with the people we love, and by the time we left, our hearts felt very full.

But the pull of wandering was still there. It usually is.

I’ve come to understand that loving home and wanting to leave it for a while aren’t opposites. We can be enormously grateful for the people waiting for us and still feel that familiar curiosity about what lies beyond the next airport. Apparently our hearts have room for both.

This year, we’ll be traveling for three months this spring and another three months in the fall. Six months on the road. We’re pretty excited about that.

For the next three months, Portugal will be home. We spent time here before and loved it enough that we wanted to return and look more closely - not simply as travelers asking, What should we see? but as people wondering, What would it actually feel like to live here?

That’s a very different question.

Portugal has become enormously popular with people considering a move to Europe, including retirees and people who can work remotely. It isn’t difficult to understand why. The climate is appealing, the country is beautiful, the food is wonderful, and daily life can feel considerably less frantic than what many of us are accustomed to.

So we’re going to spend time in several places, including the Algarve, Lisbon, Porto, Madeira, and a few stops in between, paying attention to the things that don’t necessarily make the travel brochures. What are the neighborhoods like when you’re not sightseeing? Where do people buy groceries? Can you walk most places? How does the town feel in the evening? Are people friendly? Could we imagine having an ordinary Tuesday here?

That last question has become increasingly important to us. It’s easy to fall in love with a place while standing in front of its most beautiful view. The more interesting test is whether you still like it while buying toothpaste, doing laundry, waiting for a bus, or trying to figure out why the washing machine has apparently decided to communicate exclusively in Portuguese.

That’s when travel begins edging a little closer to life.

Spain is a country we’ve loved enormously, and we could easily imagine spending much more time there. But when we began looking beyond beauty and considering the less romantic parts of relocating - health care, residency, taxes, language, administration, and all the other things that apparently refuse to disappear simply because there’s a Mediterranean view - Portugal kept rising toward the top of the list.

So we’re curious. Not committed. Not shopping for furniture quite yet. Just paying attention.

And then, after returning to the United States for the summer, we’ll head back across the Atlantic in September for three months in Greece.

That part of the journey has me particularly excited. We’ll spend time on several Greek islands as well as in Athens, a city where history can make an ordinary walk feel rather extraordinary. It’s hard not to think about the fact that Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and countless others once moved through those same streets. Those are some fairly intimidating footsteps to follow.

Our approach in Greece will be much the same as Portugal. We want to experience these places slowly enough that they begin to feel less like destinations and more like communities.

We’ll visit the beautiful sights, of course. I’m still perfectly capable of becoming embarrassingly excited over an ancient ruin. But we’re equally interested in the markets, cafés, parks, neighborhoods, walks, food, weather, rhythms of daily life, and the people who actually call these places home.

That’s where travel has increasingly become most interesting to us. Not collecting countries. Not racing through lists of attractions. Just settling in long enough that somewhere begins to reveal a little of itself.

I’ll continue photographing everything that catches my eye - which, based on previous experience, will be quite a lot. I’m also planning to experiment more with short videos so that we can share not only what these places look like, but a little of how they move and sound.

A photograph can capture a remarkable moment. But sometimes you want the waves to move. You want to hear the market. You want the church bells. You want to watch someone walking across a square rather than freezing them there forever. So we’ll play with that too.

Most of all, though, we hope you’ll come along with us. One of the unexpected pleasures of sharing our travels has been hearing from people who tell us that something we wrote or photographed encouraged them to think a little differently about their own lives. That means a great deal to us.

Because our hope has never been that everyone should sell their belongings, pack a couple of bags, and wander around Europe. That would create terrible congestion at the airports.

The larger idea is much simpler. Life is remarkably easy to postpone. We wait until retirement. Until the children are grown. Until we have more money. Until work slows down. Until we feel ready.

And sometimes those are perfectly good reasons to wait. But every now and then, it’s worth asking whether there’s something we’ve been wanting to do that doesn’t actually require another five years of thinking about it.

Maybe it’s traveling. Maybe it’s learning something new. Maybe it’s moving somewhere different. Maybe it’s simply taking a road you normally drive past and finding out where it goes.

For us, right now, that road happens to lead back to Portugal. We’ve arrived with fewer belongings, a great deal of curiosity, and three months ahead of us to see what we discover.

And already, traveling lighter feels like a pretty good place to begin.

“In the end, we only regret the chances we didn’t take.”