November is here and we are thoroughly enjoying nature’s bounty. First and foremost has been the long-awaited ripening of the custard apples (aka anona or cherimoya). We’ve been eating one or two a day for the last week or so (and have about a dozen more in a box ripening above the refrigerator). If you’ve

Read more

Yard Work / Roof Work The days are getting shorter, the nights cooler, but things are still green and growing on Ilha Terceira. In preparation for the rainy season, we’ve taken our newly acquired cementing skills and patched a few spots on the bathroom roof and around the big, traditional chimney. Unfortunately, there is a

Read more

We had our much-anticipated appointments with Portuguese immigration on September 28 in Terceira’s capital, Angra do Heroísmo (“Cove of Heroism”). It was the culmination of a year’s worth of planning – from setting up a bank account and obtaining tax IDs to gathering copies of every manner of document imaginable to sending fingerprints to the

Read more

Apologies for the delay – after waiting four weeks for installation, we now have high speed fiber internet! What a relief… It is a beautiful, sunny day today and we took a walk to a protected nature reserve and lava field about 2.5 miles away (uphill both ways…) that offered some stunning views: We have

Read more

Happy return, settling in, hoop-jumping After five months of visa delays, we arrived safely in Terceira on the morning of August 21. Right away, we got to work cleaning…mold and mustiness on the inside of the house from months of being closed up and a jungle of weeds and vines on the outside along the

Read more

After much delay, headaches, and handwringing, we finally received our passports with Portuguese residency visas today! [huge sigh of relief…] Here in Dundee, we celebrated by harvesting sunflowers, carrots, potatoes (11 lbs), and the first of our tomatoes. So gratifying to get our hands in the dirt and partake in nature’s bounty (grilling some potatoes

Read more

Visa update, delays, and northern Michigan Good news: we received notification that our residency visas were approved, so we immediately overnighted our passports to NYC. Bad news: the process is nebulous (at best…) and the visa processing agency will not give us an estimate for when we will receive them, nor the current location of

Read more

Criss-crossing the USA in 4000 long miles… In order to receive our residency visas, we had to travel to Midtown Manhattan for the requisite in-person appointment with the contractors who work for the Portuguese consulate. So we drove the 557 miles from Dundee, MI to Rockaway, NJ, spent the night, and took an early NJTransit

Read more

Back in the USA! Lukus and Raymond (above, on the shore of Lake Erie) returned to S.E. Michigan at the end of March to prepare for their Portuguese visa interviews in New York City. A bit of a bureaucratic headache, we know the hard work will be worth it once we arrive back home on

Read more