PORTUGAL, LISBON: GETTING THERE IN THE TIME OF COVID

 June 21-22, 2022

This post probably has a bunch of information in it that no one but Bob and I care about, but since this blog functions as our trip journal, I want to put it down here anyway. Feel free to scan or skip.

Three weeks before we were scheduled to leave for Portugal, when we were babysitting our granddaughters for a week while our daughter and son-in-law were on a getaway to Mexico, Bob started feeling ill. He test positive for Covid on the evening of May 30th. I took him to the Urgent Care the following morning. They did another test, also positive, and prescribed Paxlovid, an antiviral developed to treat high-risk Covid patients. He went into quarantine in our daughter's basement.

Two days later I woke up sick, tested negative, but went to Urgent Care, where I tested positive. Later in the day our oldest granddaughter also tested positive at home. It was clear we needed to go home before we infected everyone. Our daughter and SIL canceled the remainder of their trip and booked a flight home. Feeling that it wasn't right to expose a plane full of people to Covid, we rented a car and drove the 650 miles home.

After three days on Paxlovid, Bob tested negative (at home) for Covid on June 4. It was ten days before I tested negative on June 11. However, Bob had a rebound on June 10, something that occasionally happens with Paxlovid. The rebound commonly lasts three days, but on June 20, the day before our trip, Bob still hadn't had an official negative test, which was required for entry into Portugal. (As far as we could tell, Portugal was one of the last EU countries to require that, and it was on every site we looked at. I see that the requirement was officially lifted on July 1.) It was 21 days since Bob's original positive test. He hadn't had any symptoms for days, so a friend who is a Physician's  Assistant wrote a letter for him that cleared him for travel, but we were still nervous about Portugal's requirements.  We weren't sure if the letter would be accepted as it wasn't on an EU form, which seemed to be required, but visitors from outside the EU can't use the EU forms. So complicated. 

AFRICA: LOS ANGELES TO NAIROBI, KENYA

In May 2014 we embarked on a true adventure, a safari trip to Kenya and Tanzania, followed by a few days in Ghana.

The trip had what I think is a very unique origin. My husband is a partner in a law firm comprising five male attorneys. Five years ago, on the 15th anniversary of the formation of their firm, they planned a trip to Peru to celebrate, and they brought their wives along. We had so much fun that we decided to do it again to celebrate their 20th anniversary, but what trip could top Machu Picchu? Why, an African safari, of course!

Here we are in the firm parking lot, minus one couple we still had to pick up on our way to LAX.

It's pretty amazing to find five attorneys who not only actually enjoy each other's company, but who have wives who also like each other. A sixth couple, clients of the law firm, expressed an interest in going on a safari, and they were invited to come along. They were a wonderful addition.

We booked our African safari through Fun for Less Tours, a company Bob and I had previously traveled with to Russia and Scandinavia. (The posts on that trip begin here.) We had been so impressed with the quality of that tour that we felt confident about booking another one with them. (Note: We have already booked a third trip through Fun for Less for next year.) Our safari had a total of 35 travelers plus a married couple serving as the tour coordinators.

We met up with our traveling companions in the firm parking lot at 8:00 AM and were transported to LAX by airport shuttles. We arrived in plenty of time to check in and have breakfast.

We flew KLM Airlines to Nairobi via Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, a great place to spend an hour:

From Amsterdam we had a direct flight to Nairobi.

PORTLAND, OREGON: MORE TREATS AND EATS

My daughter is a food blogger. It's an important part of both the previous post about food carts and about this post about All the Stuff We Ate in Portland. I'm sure that if she weren't a food blogger, we would have eaten only fresh vegetables in reasonable quantities.

Whew! It's so nice to have an excuse for these food posts!

Lilly's Hummus
I'll start with a food destination that really, truly is all about healthy eating.  Rachael has done some photography for Lilly's Hummus, a wonderful home-grown business in Portland, and when she told the office she was going to be in Portland, they invited her to come see the factory, and I got to tag along.

Just about the first thing I noticed when we walked in was a seven-foot-tall poster of a darling little girl enjoying her hummus snack.  Hey! That sparkling face belongs to my grand-daughter, hummus connoisseur extraordinaire!  What fun!
We loved meeting Lilly herself. I was impressed to learn how her now national company began in her own kitchen as she made hummus to sell at a local farmers market. "People would get made when we sold out," she told us, so she started making more and more of her organic, locally-sourced hummus. Soon they had to move production to a small factory, and just recently they've moved into quite a large facility that we were able to tour.