My Bad Idea for Escaping the Heat Wave

It was the very beginning of July, and the heat wave that had effectively smelted most of Europe was on its way down to Portugal. Since I had just gone from having one tiny reptilian roommate to having a whole tri-species family in my little un-air-conditioned flat, I felt that I should do something decisive.

This is not my strong suit.

I reasoned that if it was going to be hot in Lisbon, it would surely be cooler up in the mountains. It’s always cool in the mountains, right?

So I looked online and booked three nights in a “nature tourism” country-house-resort-thingy up in the Serra da Estrela. I figured that it might be nice to do some hiking in the mountains, where it would surely be cool.

As soon as I had made the booking, Elizabeth pointed out to me that pugs don’t hike. As a matter of fact, turtles don’t hike either (I already knew this). So that put a damper on my nature tourism plans.

I also went online, belatedly, and looked at the predictions for temperatures around the country. To my surprise, I saw that it was expected to be just about as hot in the mountains as in Lisbon. Ooops.

Noting that the coolest part of the country was the coast, I booked us one night, pre-mountains, in Aveiro, a reportedly lovely city on the coast that I had never visited before. Then it would be a straight shot across this skinny little country from Aveiro to the nature-tourism-country-house-resort-thingy.

I felt so smart.

We piled into the car and drove north along the A8. Outdoors, it was about 38 C, or 100 Fahrenheit, but we had air conditioning in the car. The dog loved the air conditioning in the car.

After a couple hundred kilometers and a few service-station sandwiches of varying edibility, we arrived in Aveiro, which turned out to be a cute town indeed. It has canals with actual gondolas. This prompts some people to refer to it as the Venice of Portugal, though this is a bit like saying that Columbus is the Rome of Ohio because it has the Taft Coliseum.

We had a lovely dinner: grilled fish and chilled wine on the table, with the dog chilling under it. Elizabeth was as beautiful as ever, though Olive was the one who got all the attention from waiters, passing tourists, and the occasional yippy dog.

I offered to carry the dog in her special doggy backpack—made by a company actually called “Little Chonk”—which makes both of us look somewhat crazy.

Olive the pug, as I wrote recently in my piece on centers of stability and centers of chaos, is an adorable little font of chaos in my life at present. We really do get along very well—“She loooooves you!”, says Elizabeth quite frequently. And I love her, too. I express my love by walking her, feeding her, and petting her soft little dandelion coat. She expresses her love for me when I lie down, by hopping up on the bed, making a little nest between my legs, and snoring like a motherfucker.

So I was not as rested as I would ideally have been, when we arose in Aveiro to start our journey up to the mountains.

Also, there was a problem.

One thing you should know about Portugal, if you are thinking of visiting during the summer, and especially if you are thinking of buying property anywhere near a tree, is that the country has an increasing problem with wildfires.

As fate would have it, right on the day we arrived in Aveiro, a wildfire started in Vouzela, which is halfway between Aveiro and the mountains. The fire was right by the A25 highway, which we had to take. It was not clear whether the highway would be passable.

The sky in Aveiro was dark with smoke, but the reports all indicated that it would be safe to drive on the A25 to Viseu.

Still, I wondered whether I was doing something incredibly stupid by driving my new little tri-species family right into the fire zone. I imagined trying to explain this later:

“So where did you go on holiday?”

“Blazing inferno.”

“Oh, really? Is that near Setúbal?”

“Not quite.”

Despite my misgivings, we drove up the highway, toward Vouzela, toward the mountains. We saw a rather ironic quote from a Smiths song painted on an overpass. At least it wasn’t Blue Öyster Cult.

And then we drove through the fire zone. At first, the sky was a lurid grayish yellow that made me think of early post-industrial England. Then we started to see billowing black smoke that looked more like something from Mordor. As we made it upwind of the worst of the blaze, we came very close to a series of minor fires unsettlingly close to the highway.

Luckily, my concern for Olive seemed ill-placed. She slept through the whole thing, nestled between my legs. (Don’t worry, Elizabeth was driving.)

We made it to Viseu, another city that I had heard about but never visited. We didn’t have time to do much other than eat lunch. But I did what I always do in such towns: take a look at what is locally considered “fashion”.

We had a very pleasant lunch in a restaurant with a tree-covered back courtyard, which was a boon, as it was infernally hot out. The waiter, who had a French bulldog—though not on him—gave Olive lots of attention.

Then I realized that little Stjärna needed some attention, too. I took her out of her special foam-lined travel box and gave her a drink of water. Then she amused us by unexpectedly peeing on the car window. But one thing you learn as a pet owner is what surfaces can safely be peed on. We just splashed some water on it and got back on the road.

I bet you didn’t get turtle pee on your windshield last week.

After the unsettling chaos of the fire zone, the dry but still-green mountains suddenly seemed incredibly welcoming. We drove up almost as far as Guarda, but turned off and wound our way through a series of villages up into the serra.

When we finally arrived at the nature-tourism-country-house-resort-thingy, I was initially worried, when the first buildings we saw were dilapidated and abandoned. But then we came to a gate.

The gate was locked.

There were instructions on the gate to call the place up and request entry using a special app accessed by a QR-code. Guess how well that worked.

Luckily, there was also a telephone number written in pen, which I called. No answer. I called again. No answer again.

It was nearly a hundred degrees outside, and I was standing by my car with a woman, a dog, and a turtle looking at me with the unspoken question of when we would get out of this heat.

After ten minutes, I finally got through. A woman with a thick local accent told me to type a number into the keypad.

I couldn’t find the keypad.

She told me to look behind me, and I finally spotted it, three or four meters back, on a stake coming out of the ground. I walked to the stake, typed the number she had said, and nothing happened.

I told her that nothing had happened.

We confirmed the number. I had it right.

She asked me whether I had pressed OWN. I asked her what she meant. She said I had to press the OWN button.

I was temporarily stymied, but after looking at the keypad again, I saw that there was a button labeled ON. I pressed it, and entered the code.

The gate swung open, very, very slowly. We drove in, rather too fast.

The place was nice enough. It had numerous rugged buildings built from the local stone. There were impossibly thick stone tables outdoors, some with better chairs than others.

Apparently, each guest got a little “casa” with a cute name, such as Casa do Rio. I was curious to see inside the Casa do Paraíso. How nice could it actually be?

Our apartment was called Casa do Sol. OK, house of the sun. Fine. Why was it in the basement then? There were almost no windows.

What was worse, the apartment had clearly been styled in the 1970s, with some furnishings added as recently as the 1980s.

I looked at the orange and avocado bathroom, at the swanky leather-girt bed, at the funky wall clock that last showed the correct time at 1:08 PM on August 17, 1988. I wanted to cry. I wanted to apologize to Elizabeth. I wanted to apologize to the pug and the turtle, though I knew they wouldn’t care.

Instead, what I did was immediately shatter a bottle of wine.

To be fair, this was not intentional. I simply took some wine out of our cooler and placed it in the fridge. It was a mini-fridge, of the kind that people had in college back in the 1980s. What I didn’t know about such fridges is that they are not a safe place for wine bottles. When I opened the door a second time, the bottle came tumbling out with a masculine KA-CHONK and baptized most of the apartment floor.

I went to find the lady who said OWN to ask her for help. She was patient and kind, as though this happened every day. Though I suspect it doesn’t, as she sliced her finger while helping me mop it up. I felt terrible about that.

The last thing I wanted was to trouble our injured OWN-lady with getting on the wifi, but since we were so far up in the mountains that I had no phone coverage in the room, I really needed it.

The room had a funny sign that said, “Here we have all we need: love and wifi”. What made it even funnier was that the wifi didn’t work. I started to wonder about the love.

The estate, such as it was, also had a few things I felt we didn’t need, such as barking dogs. There was one gigantic hound roaming loose who scared the bejeezus out of me by barking right in my face.

“Oh, that’s just Rocky”, said the OWN-lady. “He’s a sweetheart.”

Okay.

There were also two cats roaming around, who we came to know quite well over the next couple of days. Winnie was an orange tabby who was obsessed with getting into our room. He would sit outdoors on the window sill and stare at me in a creepy way. This also didn’t do much for the feeling of love.

Then there was Chloe, who had long, gray hair and was not disturbed by anything at all.

I know this because I learned, to my dismay, that my adorable little crotch-snoring darling Olive, who is as good-natured as can be, hates cats.

Well, maybe she doesn’t actually hate them, but when she sees them, she goes ballistic and starts snarling and barking.

I asked Elizabeth to explain this to me, and she sheepishly acknowledged that Olive had never actually met any cats.

“How can a dog never have seen any cats?”

“We just didn’t really have any cats around. What can I say?”

“Do you think she can get used to them now?"

“I think it would have been better about nine years ago.”

In any case, the reason I know that Chloe is imperturbable is that the picture above was taking while Olive was barking at her. Now that is one cool cat.

Speaking of cool, although it was super-hot up there in the mountains, we did at least have air conditioning. That in itself seemed worth the drive. Also, there was a pool, which looked rather inviting.

The problem, of course, was little Olive, who not only had never seen any cats, but had never really swum either.

Knowing this, we had purchased a little doggy life preserver, which she was not thrilled about. I imagined her saying, “Mom, why in the world are you dressing me up as a fire hydrant?”

The idea was not for Olive to swim; it was just for her not to drown. So we swam around for a while while she sat on a cooling pad, tied to the railing, while two dogs tied to nearby trees barked at her continuously.

Naturally, it was tempting to see whether Olive would enjoy the water. But of course, it’s not permitted to have a dog in the pool. So we would never do that. Never ever. Certainly not.

She actually kind of liked it.

I had sort of hoped that our nature-tourism-country-house-resort-thingy would serve some meals other than breakfast, but that turned out not to be the case. The OWN-lady told me about one restaurant that was only five kilometers away, and another that was “only” fifteen. We went to the closer one.

This actually turned out to be such a nice place that I did something I never do: go back to the same restaurant two days in a row. We sat outdoors with Olive and ate fabulous dishes of pork and cod and drank surprisingly good hyper-local wine.

One evening, there was a large gathering of people there, including several children. Two of the kids were fascinated by Olive. They asked what her name was.

“Chama-se Olive.”

They looked at me blankly.

“Oliva.”

Still no reaction.

“Azeitona.”

“Azeitona! Aaaah! Azeitona! Que fofa és, Azeitona!”

They thought that “olive” was a hysterical name for a dog, and totally flipped when they connected it with the name of their own dog, Morango—which means “strawberry”.

Olive and Strawberry were introduced to each other over the course of the evening, and Olive ate up all the attention. Apparently kids are much better than cats.

Adorably, when we got in our car to leave, the kids chased us down and knocked on the window. When we rolled this down, they said, “We just wanted to say goodbye to Azeitona! We love you, Azeitona!”

I was starting to see why dogs are more popular pets than turtles.

Back at the ranch (as it were), we all turned in for a good night’s sleep. Some of us slept better than others.

One thing that seemed rather out of place in our out-of-the-way nature-tourism thingy context was that we heard the sound of loud partying all night long—or at least until 5 AM.

When I asked about this the next day, the woman (a new woman now; the OWN-lady was OAF) said, oh yes, that was unfortunate. It was the festival in the next village. What awful music they play now!

I asked if the awful music would be played again that evening. She wasn’t sure.

I decided just to be Zen about it. And the best way for me to reinforce my inherently weak Zen nature is to spend time with my turtle.

I bathed little Stjärna and fed her. Then we sat outdoors in the sun for a while, before engaging in that most perfect of activities: a turtle snuggle. We took a lovely nap together.

The afternoon activity was swimming. The best thing about this nature-resort-thingy was that it was right on a river, which was perfect for swimming in. Perfect, that is, if you don’t mind the sensation of tiny fish pecking at your legs. Me, I kind of like it. But of course I nap with a turtle.

The activity we chose for our last full day in the mountains was a trip to Guarda, a city that—for a change of pace—I actually had been to. In fact, I knew one restaurant there that I really liked, and I was desperately hoping that they would allow us to bring our dog there. But I didn’t think they had outdoor seating.

I called and asked if I could make a reservation. The lady told me yes. I told her we had a dog, and asked whether there was any chance we could bring her—a sweet little innocuous pup, very quiet, fits right under the table. I didn’t mention the cat thing.

She frowned audibly, and then went away to speak to someone for a minute. When she came back, she said, “OK, here’s what we’re going to do. We have reserved a table for two right by the door. You’re going to bring your dog in and put it under the table, and nobody will see anything. Just let my son know when you arrive. He really likes dogs.”

Thrilled with this level of accommodation, we set off for Guarda.

On the way there, we passed through the little town that had been rocking out all night long. It looked like a very sleepy little village, whose patron saint apparently has a knife through his head. I hoped I would not feel that way the next morning.

We drove on winding mountain roads into Guarda, a charming hilltop town where nice things like used book fairs happen.

We got to our restaurant right on time, and the smiling young man running the show conspiratorially helped us usher Olive to her place under the table.

The food, as had been the case in the past, was delicious. One of the side dishes, as often happens with Portuguese food, tasted much better than it looked. It was a version of migas—bread crumbs cooked with garlic and olive oil—that featured cabbage, something not seen as much in the south. It was actually delicious.

The clandestine dog-stashing worked very well, until an Italian family with a very young girl came in and sat opposite. Suddenly it was all shrieks of, “Guarda, un cane!” (which I found funny, as we were in Guarda). I managed the girl’s interest with a Mr. Bean-like perfomance blending daft smiling and desperate shushing.

When we returned “home”, I went for another swim in the river. Luckily, the hearty Portuguese lunch didn’t sink me. The cold mountain river water really was the perfect antidote to the oppressive heat.

Finally, our stay came to an end. We had breakfast and one last swim, said goodbye to Winnie, Chloe, and Rocky, piled all of our tri-species gear into the car, and hit the road.

Several things had gone off with a hitch, but we had made the best of it. I was extremely grateful to Elizabeth for her lovely, easygoing nature, to Olive for her affection and her entertainment value, and to Stjärna for being the best turtle traveler in the world.

As we wound down the road out of the mountains, I reflected that I hadn’t really thought about the heat wave too much. So maybe it had been a successful trip, after all.

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