Badger Blog

Portugal As mentioned in my previous blog entries Portugal met virtually all of our requirements. Sure the visa process and moving would be expensive and exhausting, but it would be totally worth it, right? Right? Maybe. Or maybe not. The intent was to rent for a year until we felt confident we wanted to live in Portugal, and only after that find a permanent place to live, bring over our household goods and (more importantly) the horses. That would mean Elayne had to go nearly a year with almost no horseback riding. Not good. And as made clear in my previous blog entry trail riding and boarding in Portugal were going to be challenging. No matter how we tried to arrange things either I would be unhappy living in a rural area where Elayne could ride often or she would be unhappy living in an urban area with severely restricted trail riding opportunities. And so yes, Portugal would be totally worth the cost and bother of the move if we did not want to also continue with the same amount of...

  The trip is over and, for the most part, we met our primary objectives of finding areas where we might want to live and places where we could keep our horses and places where we could ride. So could we make the move and be satisfied and happy with our choices? Let's go over some details before answering. What sort of housing? The housing in the urban centers is either high rise condos and apartments (sometimes in soul crushing massive public housing blocks), smaller condo buildings, duplexes (what we call town homes or terraced houses in the US) and individual houses (not common, and sometimes two housing units shared a single shared wall). We found most of the condos to be unappealing. Even in the buildings we liked we could only imagine living on the top floor to avoid the inevitable sound of stomping feet overhead. This rather quickly focused our searches for duplexes and houses. But even with these options we found that some neighborhoods were just too densely packed with too...

Travel times between various Portuguese locations Times are listed in hh:mm format. The Equestrian center shown is just outside of Barcelos. Data is from Google Maps . Equestrian Center driving Vila do Conde train/metro Matosinhos train/metro Porto (Bolhao) train/metro Airport train/metro Braga 00:25 02:00 01:45 00:45 01:30 Vila do Conde 00:37 -- 01:00 00:51 00:38 Matosinhos 00:45 01:00 -- 00:52 00:40 Suprisingly Vila do Conde appears to be at the sweet spot for transit time.   

"Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day, You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way." Pink Floyd, Time       We recently returned from our second scouting trip to Portugal but have yet to get together and discuss our thoughts and feelings in detail about moving there. And before we do that we need to talk about time, or more precisely what we plan to do with all of our free time once we retire. The last thing we need is to pick up our entire household and haul it nearly halfway across the world only to find ourselves sitting mostly idle and bored in our new home because we did not properly plan how we would fill the bulk of our hours each day and make sure that we could actually do the things we enjoy. A good place to start is reviewing what each of us currently does to pass the time. Elayne works part time and so for two and a half days each week she is occupied with her career. She spends most of her free time with our horses: riding them, doing ground ...