We’ve had a great time in Maderia but are getting ready to head back to the United States.  This has been a pleasant place to hang out while waiting for covid vaccinations to become available and international travel to open up.  The weather has been great ranging from mid 60s to mid 70s (around 18-24 C).  We’ve had around six days that were rainy enough that we stayed inside, otherwise nearly every day has been good for walking.  But before I show pictures of our walking routes I realized we didn’t have a picture of the new year fireworks.  The fireworks ringed the town of Funchal, with additional fireworks in the town center.  We had a nice view from the balcony of our second apartment.

Walking trail behind a small neighborhood, looking out over the valley and terraces.

Up the hill from our Ponta do Sol house (#3) they were building a bus stop.  It was finished by the time we moved on.  It has a tiled bench, picnic table, sheltered area, and quite the view.

Our house #3 in Ponta do Sol was ultra modern.  There were two units, we had the two bedroom unit on the left and there was a one bedroom unit on the right- with a shared pool.  The pool overlooks banana trees and the town and ocean below.  We had our own upper and lower decks which Deb used a lot.

I have to confess that I “borrowed” these pictures from the AirBnB listing- they had done such a nice job with the photography.  Below you see the bathroom, complete with huge sliding glass door leading to an alcove with papaya plants.

Since the house faced South-west, we had wonderful sunsets most nights.

Back to the walking trails. Being a little higher in elevation we were more likely to end up in or near the clouds.

House #4, our final house in Madeira, was further west along the coast.  Another nice modern design- we’ve had our choice of  properties during our stay here due to the very limited number of tourists.

When we arrived we found that our hosts had brought fresh flowers to us.  The yellow ones were about baseball sized.  The purple ones (next pic) were placed in a dry rock vase, and keep their color as they dry out.

Although they offered to clean the apartment every week we told them we were happy to take care of it ourselves.  They did stop by every three weeks to four weeks to clean anyway and left us these:

The don’t even look real, they are so unusual.  These are about 8 or 9 inches in diameter when opened with a stem about an inch in diameter.

Of course, the flowers outside along our walks are very nice too.

The purple flowers below come in a variety of colors- yellow, bright deep orange, and red. They are so glossy they are almost metallic looking.

A couple more Levada pictures.  On our typical walks there are a few areas with significant drop offs.  Some areas have railings but many don’t. The walkway is usually about 15 inches wide in the narrow spots.

And the trees have been blooming for spring- some are covered in delicate off-white flowers. This tree has such tiny leaves that you have to get close to even see them.

So now that we are about done with Madeira, what’s next? We are heading back to the United States in mid May and will be hanging out in Southern Wisconsin for about 6 weeks while we get our Covid vaccinations.  After that we plan to wander through the Midwest catching up with friends and family. It has been nearly two years since we had a chance to see everyone as covid hit early during our trip home last spring. After that we are hoping that international travel opens up.  We are hearing more countries that are opening to vaccinated folks. Iceland in the late summer/fall looks like a possibility and perhaps Israel over the winter. But we’ll remain flexible depending on Covid status and how much things are open. 

An update on our Portuguese residency-  the latest hangup has been our US background check which needs to be apostilled.  Apostilling is essentially an international notarization process stating that the US background check is the correct, legal document. To get this done we need to get fingerprinted, send those to the FBI, get the background check, then turn that in to a company that hand carries it to the US government for apostilling. With Covid slow-downs the apostille process has been taking several months- while the background check expires in 90 days.  So by the time we get the document it’s already invalid.  We thought this was going to happen to us again, but nine weeks into the process we called and found that the document had been apostilled! We sent it to our Portuguese lawyers by second day air and they got it to the government in time.  We also had to get out marriage license apostilled but that could be done by the state of Minnesota and went much smoother.  So now we have our preliminary approval for residency!  We still need to submit our fingerprints for a background check within Portugal but probably won’t be allowed to do that before we leave.  We’ll have to make a special trip back to Portugal in the future.  After that we will be on our way to way to being Portuguese residents!  We will be thrilled to have much more freedom to travel throughout the Schengen zone countries.

Bye for now,

Tim & Deb