The Azorean Butterfly Effect
March 28 - April 18, 2022
Originally, we wanted to go to some different islands. When the travel restrictions started loosening after omicron, we looked into countries in southeast Asia, but all of them still required too many time-consuming hoops to jump through for entry. Then we set our sights on the Seychelles: Our friend Kasia got stranded there when the pandemic first hit and ended up staying for months afterward, even after she could theoretically leave. We’d see her pictures of paradise on social media and think, “I sure wish I was there instead of my apartment.” And we almost did go there, but we ended up planning this vacation relatively last minute, which would have made a trip to the Seychelles very expensive; much more than we wanted to pay for a glorified beach vacation.
We’d talked about wanting to go to the Azores for years, and when we looked at booking a trip there, we were surprised by how (relatively) affordable it was, especially last minute. And because the islands are part of Portugal in the EU, there were no COVID hoops to jump through for entry. The only hesitation came from the fact that one of the islands, São Jorge, was currently experiencing thousands of tiny earthquakes, indicating that the volcano there might erupt. So, we booked our trip to the other islands instead (which turned out to be the ones the people of São Jorge were fleeing to). The Azores sit in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, about a third of the way between mainland Portugal and North America. To get there, we had to wake up extremely early to fly to Porto, wait around there all afternoon exhausted while seemingly every restaurant we wanted to eat at was closed, and then lie around in the airport for a while longer before eventually catching a flight to the largest island of São Miguel around dinnertime.
São Miguel Island
We were able to book surprisingly nice and affordable accommodation at every stop, and on first glance, the first spot in Ponta Delgada appeared to be a lovely, fully-furnished two-floor flat. But though everything looked new and renovated, they were the sort of renovations that aren’t actually comfortable or functional, just cosmetic. The entire place had been blasted with fragrances that, once we allowed to dissipate, exposed a deep stench of mildew hiding behind the walls. The streets in Ponta Delgada were comically narrow, and we were immediately glad that we had rented the smallest (and cheapest) car possible: a white Nissan Micra that we nicknamed the White Bean.
The Azores have their own special type of pineapple called “sweet cayenne” which is smaller and less sweet than the ubiquitous varieties. This type takes two years to grow and has a richer, smokier flavor. The pineapple plantation in Ponta Delgada called it “the most delicious pineapple in the world,” which intrigued Kirb, as pineapple is his favorite fruit. The plantation lets you wander through the greenhouses for free with a self-guided tour that uses QR codes on posters to teach you about the history of the pineapples. Long story short: Azoreans started farming them after the orange crops that had been their livelihood were destroyed by an insect plague in the 1800s. After the tour, you can buy servings of the pineapple and alcoholic drinks made with its juice from the cafe, and we tried a bit of everything. Friends, we can attest that the sweet cayenne is indeed the most delicious pineapple we have ever put in our mouths. From that point on, we bought them on every island and enjoyed them in fruit salads for breakfast each morning for the rest of the trip.
We had a surprisingly amazing and affordable first lunch of squid risotto and grilled vegetables with romesco, setting our hopes high that food would be generally that good for the rest of the trip. We opted for local specialties for dinner: Azorean pineapple and blood sausage, limpets served with local oranges that were as tart as lemons, and slow-cooked beef with mashed sweet potato. There seemed to be no shortage of interesting and delicious foods to try.
Pineapples are great and all, but the real reason we came to the Azores was to go hiking, and supposedly São Miguel was the top island in the Azores for outdoor enthusiasts. We started by hiking around the rim of the Sete Cidades caldera, which looks down on two adjacent lakes named for their distinct colors, Lagoa Verde (green), and Lagoa Azul (blue). Though the initial view was stunning, the hike itself wasn’t particularly engaging, so after about 45 minutes we decided to turn around and head back to the car. Not far away was the Serra Devassa hike, which took us up to viewpoints that overlooked the ocean in several directions and then down along several smaller lakes, transitioning from grassy highlands to evergreen forests over the course of two hours.
By the time we had finished hiking for the day, it was sunny and warm and we were hungry, but it wasn’t quite time to head back to town for dinner. All we wanted was for a nice beachside bar where we could get some chilled white wine and a snack while we looked at the ocean, which didn’t seem like it should be particularly hard on an island with so much coastline. So we started driving and googling, and though the drive was beautiful, we were shocked after an hour of following the winding coastal road that there were literally zero bars or restaurants that took advantage of the island’s main scenic selling point. Eventually, after making it most of the way to the northeastern edge, we turned around, as there was one place called “Sunset Steve’s Bar” that was in the opposite direction we initially headed. There was no beach here, just harsh, jagged black rocks, but it was on the water, and they had bifanas (pork sandwiches) for €3 and ice-cold vinho verde on tap for €2 a glass. Steve’s place was a godsend. Vinho verde on tap is one of the greatest things the Portuguese have given this world. It was unbelievable that this beachside bar was the exception on São Miguel and not the rule.
The next day we headed out to explore Parque Natural da Ribeira dos Caldeirões. There’s a nice, big waterfall by the parking lot and a manicured trail that leads back to another more secluded waterfall on a 5-minute hike, but the rest of the grounds were under construction and essentially shut down to tourists. They did have an information center though, and the woman working there gave us a recommendation for another hike in the area that was a bit more substantial. This one started in a small town with no parking lot and led through the woods to a tiny little lagoon called Poco Azul. The trail then took us to the edge of a ravine with the ocean in the distance, the sort of viewpoint where you look at it and say, “I have to walk all the way down there?” The trek down was steep but relatively short, surrounded on all sides by bushy wild grasses we’d never seen before that were easily 20 feet high. At the bottom was a whitewashed church overlooking the ocean, sitting on a field of white wildflowers, with another trail leading back towards the ravine wall where a waterfall was hidden away behind thick foliage and pink blossoms.
São Miguel is a geothermal hotspot, and there are hot springs all over the island. Nothing sounded better than a good soak after a long hike, so we made our way to the Poça da Dona Beija thermal baths, which cost €8 for an hour and a half on the premises. Different pools had different temperatures, and of course, different characters: the guy taking one million selfies in the corner, trying to get his thinning hair to look just right; the large, hairy man in his 50s telling a story ONLY WITH YELLING to the people sitting nearby. Eventually we found a pool with other humans who were also interested in relaxing in the hot spring and had a lovely afternoon.
Something that has been constant in our travels is locals recognizing that we like to have fun and then giving us good advice. This happened at the pineapple plantation, where one of the guys working there saw us drinking and laughing and came over and started chatting with us and then gave us all sorts of recommendations for where to go and eat. One of these recommendations was for a restaurant called Bar Caloura, which he insisted had the best seafood on the island, and because it was a bit of a drive from Ponta Delgada, was mostly a spot for locals. We got a seat directly on the water and ordered mussels slathered in “house sauce” (butter, garlic, and piri piri chilis), large shrimp in a different mixture of spicy, garlicky oil, and grilled triggerfish. Those mussels were as good as they get. Thank you, pineapple man, you were on the money with that recommendation. There would be many times later on in the trip when we ate sub-par seafood and would reminisce: “Remember how good that food at Bar Caloura was?”
It was rainy and windy and cold the next day and we were the only car in the parking lot for the trail to the Salto do Cabrito waterfall. The first section of the hike followed along and on top of a thick green pipe as it snaked through the woods, and soon we became enamored with it, remarking, “I like our new friend pipe. Pipe always tells us where we need to go.” Eventually, pipe led us to the edge of the waterfall, with steep, narrow stairs that descended down the side of the cliff. The rest of the trail was unfortunately kind of lame, forcing us to walk along exposed roads in the rain all the way home. We missed our friend pipe. The wind was really whipping when we got back to the parking lot and our clothes were soaking wet. The instant we got inside the car and shut the doors, the rain and wind stopped for the rest of the afternoon.
Next, we headed to the Gorreana tea plantation, the only tea plantation in all of Europe. There were free samples inside, and one of them was surprisingly good, so we bought a few bags to bring home before meandering a bit through the tea fields, killing some time before our reservation at the Caldeira Velha thermal pools.
We were so excited to go to these hot springs. They are tucked away in lush rainforest and there are a limited number of people who can come inside at any given time so you need to book in advance. We parked in the lot and walked up the stairs and saw exactly what you do not want to see at the entrance of a hot spring if you were hoping to have a chill, relaxing time: teenagers. A literal busload of teenagers. By the time we got inside and changed into our suits, the teenagers had already infested all of the pools, swarming, screaming, just screaming everywhere they went. You were supposed to bring sandals here, which we didn’t know, and so getting between the pools on the gravel was a slow, painstaking process for us, made even slower and more painstaking by the fact that Mazz’s back was acting up, forcing her to move at a snail’s pace. The grounds were gorgeous, and the pools warm and inviting, but there was absolutely zero chill at this place. Kirb was furious and was very close to just leaving, but there was one pool with all of the other people our age, the only pool where the teenagers weren’t actively screaming, and so we crammed in there and tried to enjoy ourselves. Like the last hot springs we had visited, this place also had 90-minute visitation slots. After an hour, the most amazing thing happened: the child wranglers started rounding up all the teenagers and putting them back on their bus. For the last half an hour we had the pools basically to ourselves, and there was quiet, and the birds in the trees nearby started chirping again. The teenagers were gone, and the healing could finally begin.
We were not sad to leave behind our smelly flat in Ponta Delgada and relocate to the town of Furnas, on the other side of the island. Here, we splurged a bit on what was called an “eco pod,” which looked like a big cement rectangle from the outside. On the inside though, the place was a sleek, modern, and extremely comfortable apartment, with bay windows on one entire side looking out on a lush forest. There was a wild storm that first night, with rain coming down so hard that Mazz woke up Kirb in the middle of the night just to say, “Listen to that.”
We couldn’t believe it was sunny when we woke up, and spent a leisurely morning sipping coffee and reading before our reservation for a hearty local lunch. Cozida is a stew of meats and vegetables that have been slow-cooked inside a container that is dropped down into boiling thermal waters. We were informed by the woman who ran our pod that Tony’s Restaurant in town was the place to go, and she nicely made us a reservation for the place when it opened at noon. It was indeed a weekend destination in the area, with table after table full of people ordering heaping platters of the stew. It was a delicious but heavy lunch, so we ate half and took the rest home for a whole other meal.
The Terra Nostra Garden in Furnas is a truly incredible sight. There are more than 600 different plant species there from all around the world, meticulously landscaped around thermal water sources. There are paths that meander all around the property, and at the center is an enormous pool of warm, copper-brown water you can swim in. There are also several smaller thermal pools tucked away in palms and ferns, and after a few hours exploring the grounds, we made our way there for a relaxing dip. It really felt like a slice of paradise. And then, wouldn’t you know it, the exact same busload of teenagers showed up and swarmed the place, but this time, it was more funny than it was annoying. Thankfully, we’d already had our fill of soaking at that point, so we got dressed and left the screaming teens behind. But from that point on for the rest of the trip, whenever we were enjoying a nice relaxing moment, one of us would inevitably ask, “How long until you think the teenagers show up?”
Flores Island
It took about an hour to fly northwest from São Miguel to the tiny Island of Flores, where there are only about 3000 residents, and we could tell the vibe was different there from the moment we landed. We went to get our rental car from the terminal and the woman had no interest in looking it over with us and checking for damage. This time, the Isla Verde Rent-A-Car had given us a red Nissan Micra, and it was all sorts of dinged up and lived in. We quickly found that our new “Kidney Bean” had no guts whatsoever and could barely make it up a steep hill in first gear, but it did get us across to the other side of the island in less than half an hour. The sky was sunny and blue, but it wasn’t supposed to stay that way for long, so we checked out some vistas on the way to our cottage, in case we wouldn’t get another chance in the next few days. Driving along roads that seemed to disappear into a horizon where sea met sky, we felt like we had been transported to the actual edge of the earth.
We decided to go a bit more rustic with our lodging on Flores and booked a cottage at Aldeia da Cuada, a farming colony that dates back to the 1700s which was eventually abandoned in the 1960s. Though the cabins have since been renovated with things like electricity and roofs, they are still thoroughly old-world, with stacked stone exteriors, sinks carved from rock, and wood-burning stoves for heat. We made a fire when we arrived and found out the hard way that it had improper wall sealings which filled the entire place with smoke, so they moved us to a different cabin that ended up having an even better garden view of the ocean and surrounding property. The restaurant on the grounds was expensive but not especially good, and we realized that we had gotten particularly lucky with the quality of food we’d started with on São Miguel, and everything had sort of gone downhill since.
The Costa Sul e Sudoeste trail on Flores starts on the top of a cliff and then switchbacks directly down to the ocean. At the bottom, there are a few houses, but there is no electricity, or running water, or roads, or even a dock to reach them. Whoever comes down to these houses has to manually lug everything they bring up and down that cliffside, which is brutal. As you make your way down the coastline you find remnants of old agriculture, like a group of banana trees planted down in a pit that are surrounded by bamboo to protect them from the wind. The trail ends at a point with dilapidated stone walls rippling away from a single, wizened tree, looking every bit like a place pagan rituals were held in ancient times. Or last week.
We had to do laundry that day, and there was supposedly a single laundromat on the island at the port in Lajes. Sure enough, “Sailor’s Laundry” was a single room next to some public bathrooms with a coin-operated washer and dryer, and just up the road was Bar O'Trancador. We bought a bottle of vinho verde for €9 and the bartender gave us a plate of beans as a snack. Mazz was delighted by this. What kind of bar gives you beans as a drinking snack?!? These yellow brined gems were called lupini beans, and they were a lovely, salty pairing to a cold and sweet glass of wine. As our clothes became clean, we read books and drank and snacked and looked out at the ocean and the pier below, which had been mangled by Hurricane Lorenzo in 2019. The bartender said the waves that night were 25 meters high. This was a truly excellent way to wash our clothes, so we left Sailor’s Laundry a glowing review on Google.
With the weather staying unexpectedly sunny, we took the Kidney Bean around to explore more of the highlands on our way home, finding hidden lakes and forests of Erica Azorica that looked like endless fields of bonzai. It felt like the perfect night for a barbecue, so we loaded up on local sausages, peppers, and pineapple and started trying to get a fire going in the grill pit outside our kitchen. Though the dense Azorean wood caught in the stove inside the cabin, it simply wouldn’t light in the pit outside, so eventually we had to cook everything in the kitchen, but we still ate it outside on our picnic table with a fabulous sunset view.
The hike along the coast from Lajedo to Faja Grande is one-way, so we paid €25 for a cab to take us to the starting point of the trail, and eventually we would end up on the road back to our cabin. The path was wet and slippery, leading through grazing land and forests on the hillside above the coast. Eventually, the path takes you down into a valley, where you walk through the ruins of a small commune that was called Caldeira. The last inhabitants of the commune departed in 1992, “in part due to the lack of electric power,” and most ended up moving to the US and Canada. The path then climbs upward from the abandoned buildings to an overlook with a clear view of the coast and massive ocean-facing cliffside which is covered in waterfalls. The path back down the other side was treacherous; an extremely steep path made of small stones covered in slick moss. Kirb slipped and ate shit after only a few minutes of stepping as carefully as he could, so we decided it was best to just walk back down along the road instead.
At the bottom of the hill is the entrance to another short hike to Poço Ribeira do Ferreiro, which our taxi driver earlier had claimed was the most beautiful spot in all of the Azores. The forest here felt enchanted, with light streaming through the leaves and babbling streams flowing alongside the rocky path. Before long, you leave the forest and are greeted with the sort of sight that makes your eyes go wide: a verdant green cliffside above a small lake, completely covered in waterfalls. We took a million pictures and none of them seemed to do any justice to the subject.
We only budgeted three days on Flores, and maybe that was enough, but we definitely wished we had more. There was something magical about this island that was unlike any other place we had visited. It was truly remote; you could drive from one end of the island to another and only see one or two other cars the entire time. It was the same with the hikes. If you wanted, you could pay €300 a night to stay directly beneath a waterfall, but you could also have your own entire stone cabin and garden overlooking the ocean for €50. The weather wasn’t supposed to be particularly nice while we were there, but for some reason, we got big chunks of sunshine every day. Flores was a best-case scenario on all fronts. Unsurprisingly, that good luck wasn’t sustainable.
Faial Island
The islands of Faial and Pico are right next to each other, and we wanted to see both, but doing so meant we would have limited time on each. So we decided not to rent a car on Faial and stay in the main port town of Horta for two days, where hopefully we could do boat stuff instead of driving stuff. Our luck did appear to be continuing when we first arrived on Faial: We were supposed to rent a room in a house that was operated by the Marine and Environmental Sciences Centre from the University of Lisbon, and upon arrival at the airport our hosts informed us that there was a plumbing problem in that building and so we had been upgraded to an apartment all our own that overlooked the pier. Great! We just needed to get a taxi from the airport into town, which didn’t seem like too tall of a task. Other people got in taxis, and we waited for our turn, and waited, and eventually we were the only ones still standing there and there were no more taxis, and as the last couple in front of us was driven away, the taxi driver said he would be back for us...in another half an hour. It took twice as long to get a cab to drive us the 15 minutes from the airport into Horta than it did to fly all the way from Flores.
The apartment they gave us was incredibly cute. Nestled up on a hill looking out over the water, it felt like a little captain’s chamber from the 1970s. We loved it immediately, and were glad to have a cozy spot to sit and wait out the storm. We had hoped to go out on a whale watching tour, but the waves were going to be far too large because of the storm. Before the rains came in, we explored the waterfront a bit and realized we were staying just around the corner from a bar we had read about while planning the trip, Peter Café Sport. A favorite destination for those on worldwide sailing trips, this place was completely covered in colorful flags and boating paraphernalia. We had a truly bizarre meal here: A steak with a big piece of bacon and pineapple on it, covered in lemon garlic sauce, served with mashed sweet potatoes that tasted like cinnamon applesauce. We never needed to eat the food here again, but the drinks were something else. Peter Café Sport made their own unique gin out of maracuja. House gin and tonics only cost €2.90 and were really, exceptionally delicious. We would definitely be coming back for more of those. After loading up on groceries to make dinner for ourselves, we nestled into our captain’s quarters while the storm blasted away outside all night.
The rain and wind continued throughout morning, but by afternoon it seemed to be letting up enough for us to venture out for a hike to the nearby green areas. There was a path that went like a figure-8 from the town to two hills, so we followed along the beach and hiked up to the top to get some nice views of Horta and the coast.
The weather was still cooperating when we were done walking around, so naturally it was time to go sit on the patio outside Café Sport and try all of their other gin drinks. Surprisingly, the standard gin and tonic was the best of the bunch; Kirb was sure that maracuja gin mixed with fresh Azorean pineapple juice was going to be his new favorite thing in the world. For dinner we went to a place nearby called Gastro bar Príncipe that had phenomenal reviews, but once again the food just wasn’t that great, even though it looked real fancy and was made with high-quality local ingredients.
Pico Island
It’s only a 30-minute ferry ride between Horta and Pico, and there was some colorful local television programming on the TV to keep us entertained during the choppy trip. It was during this ride that we learned that the storm from the last few days was actually just the beginning, and was only going to intensify. “Tropical Depression Evelyn” was promising to hit our section of the Azores particularly hard in the next few days, with 125 km/hr winds and huge amounts of rain. The ferry landed and we were pleased to find that our studio apartment was literally just around the corner. The winds were already intense, forcing us to walk at a slant all the way to the Pico Wine Coop down the road. Kirb had to hold his hat in his hand or it would have blown away in an instant.
By this point, we’d tried most of the Azorean wines either in restaurants or from the grocery stores, and found them to be just fine but not exceptional. Pico is the primary wine-producing island, which is one of the main reasons we had decided to go there. We’d waited too long to be able to book a tour of the vineyards, and at first we were pretty mad at ourselves about it, but in hindsight we didn’t miss much, largely because of the storm. The woman who gave us a tasting at the Coop kindly let us try stuff that wasn’t part of the tasting menu, and by the time we were done we’d sampled all the local varieties we had missed up to that point. They were easy-drinking and tasty wines, but the whole selling point of Pico wines is the volcanic soil; the island is literally just one big volcano in the center tapering off until the land drops into the ocean. But it really felt like they weren’t embracing the sort of minerality you can get in the grapes from volcanic soil, and instead were actively trying to work around it to get wines that tasted unsurprising and traditional. Which is a shame. A natural winemaker who is skilled in making funky junk could probably create something truly special with those grapes.
Evelyn gets nasty outside
Tropical Depression Evelyn was no joke. There was no going anywhere that evening, and we were glad to be staying next to a pizza place, even if the pizza was exactly as bad as we expected. The next day was our only full, non-travel day on Pico, so we were going hiking through the vineyards whether there was a tropical storm or not (there was). We paid a cabby to drop us off down the coast and started walking back towards town along the shore, which was nothing but craggy black volcanic rock and pounding waves.
Nothing about this beach is soft or pleasant
The vineyards on Pico are an UNESCO World Heritage Site because they are a truly singular place. Stone walls have been built up to protect the plants from the elements, and each little plot for the vines to grow is only a few feet wide and long. From the coast, those little walled-off areas continue in all directions for as far as the eye can see, creating a seemingly endless sea of stones. Around them, the area is spotted with gangly trees with white lilies blossoming at their bases, accenting the black volcanic stones. The rain and wind were truly intense on this hike, and by the time we were heading out of the labyrinth of stone walls and back to the road, we were both as wet as if we had jumped directly into the ocean. Kirb had bought a new raincoat specifically for this trip and was thrilled to see that everything under his jacket was still dry. Mazz’s fancy raincoat worked equally as well. But when the rest of you is completely soaked through, at that point it doesn’t really matter if any of you stayed dry.
Terceira Island
The flight between Pico and Terceira is comically short. Literally 3-4-songs-on-your-iPhone short. It was the shortest flight we have ever taken and will likely ever take. It took twice as long to drive to the other side of the island where we were staying, a trip in which Google maps took us the absolute dumbest route through busted-up side streets that had 1 total inch to spare between the wall, rental car, and unmovable construction equipment. We were back to the land of comically-narrow one-way streets, but now we had a car that wasn’t nearly as compact. This time, they’d given us a Ford Fiesta, and we wondered for a while what kind of bean this car was before deciding on “Party Bean.” What’s a party bean, you ask? It’s those lupini beans you eat at the bar while you’re drinking booze. That’s a party bean.
It was raining on and off, so we choose an inland hike appropriately called “Mistérios Negros,” or in English, “Dark Mysteries.” The path was muddy and hard to traverse, but the surroundings were notably different than what we had seen so far on the other islands. There were cypress trees that sat on the ridges which were a beautiful mix of orange and green, but most of the trail was indeed dark and mysterious. The trail snaked through tight, shadowy corridors of twisting, knotted roots that were growing all around mossy boulders, looking like at any moment they might constrict and ensnare you. After the hike, we explored a bit of the nearby coastline, and the winds were still pounding so hard you had to walk in slow, deliberate steps. This area was also something of a Dark Mystery, with concrete steps built out on jagged black rocks that were engulfed by the surf, looking exactly like an area Voldemort would have hidden a horcrux.
The town where we chose to stay also had an excellent fantasy name: Angra do Heroísmo, “The cove of heroism.” We rented a vacation house from a guy named Paolo and he was extremely invested in making sure we enjoyed ourselves, and so he texted us often. Really, a lot more than he should have. The weather was still crummy the next day, and all of the hikes that had been recommended involved going up to a view, so we knew ahead of time that we weren’t going to get the full experience. We would just have to enjoy the journey instead of the destination. The Serrata hike went up steeply through forest before reaching a final elevation gain with shoddy wooden steps scattered over a washed-out trail. After climbing and climbing all morning, we finally reached the top to find...a cloud. We couldn’t see the lake below, or anything but dull gray, and we laughed at the “view” with other hikers who made it to the top around the same time. The descent took us through pasture that was completely obscured, until it met up with a path that was nothing but deep, slippery muck. To the right of this treacherously goopy trail was barbed wire, ensuring that if you lost your balance in the mud your hand was going to be sliced to hell. This was a miserable hike and we hated it and literally ran all the way back down to the bottom so it would be over with quicker.
For all of Paolo’s overzealous texting, he did have some excellent advice on food, and it was on his recommendation that we went to Taberna do Teatro. This was one of the best meals we ate on the trip, with thoughtfully-prepared cod and salmon dishes served with really tasty wine that was made on Terceira. We didn’t even know that the other islands outside of Pico made wine, but the bottle of Canjirão we had at Taberna do Teatro was the best Azorean wine we drank. The waiter explained that this wine was made in a very old-fashioned way, the way it was in the olden times on the island, giving it a less-refined, funkier flavor. They used that volcanic funk to make something delicious. We thoroughly enjoyed our meal, while directly across from us, an old Jewish couple from Philadelphia complained comically about everything and anything they experienced. Comical to us at least; we’re sure they were wildly annoying to the staff. Strangely, there were a lot of older Americans on Terceira. It seemed this was the island in the Azores they flocked to.
We spent most of our final afternoon in Angra do Heroísmo trying to find a place that would let us drink wine with a view of the water, and though it wouldn’t seem like a very big ask in a Portuguese town on the ocean, somehow it just wasn’t a thing we were able to make work. We had secured a dinner reservation at a bustling seafood restaurant called Beira Mar in the nearby town of São Mateus da Calheta, and there we were able to drink another bottle of Canjirão with a lovely view of the sunset. The food wasn’t very good – calamari cooked in old, spent oil and grilled fish that was still noticeably slimy – but the locale was great. We were ready to leave the Azores.
Purgatory
We arrive at the airport at 7:30am to return the car with plenty of time before our 8:55 flight. We are the first in line to get onboard, but the gate doesn’t open. The flight is delayed; it is apparently too windy to land, and the plane is diverted to Ponta Delgada. They tell us to sit down and wait. Another announcement: They tried to land the plane again, but it is still too windy and will only get windier, and so they sent that entire plane full of people all the way back to Lisbon. After several hours the flight is officially cancelled, and everyone is taken upstairs to wait in a giant line for the customer service desk. We had big plans in Lisbon: Reservations at a fancy restaurant and an entire itinerary for the day we would spend there, eating and drinking only delicious things. Kirb had been dreaming of returning to Lisbon for the entire pandemic. We both had been dreaming of good Portuguese food after so much bad Portuguese food on this trip, but now that dream is gone. We are told we must wait overnight in a hotel, and will be emailed more information. We sit in the airport terminal while the wind outside loudly shakes the walls. We watch as a flight from TAP Air Portugal departs anyway, taking several hundred passengers to Lisbon while we wait in limbo. We curse Ryanair. We drink wine and make friends with fellow stranded passengers to pass the time.
At 4pm, after nearly 8 hours of waiting, we are instructed to go downstairs and wait there to get on a bus. Those around us do not wait to get on a bus, they just get on. The bus fills up, and we wait for another hour, and then someone from Ryanair gets on the bus and tells everyone to get off and go outside again. Everyone starts screaming in Portuguese, and one guy almost gets 86ed from the bus entirely for screaming directly in the Ryanair man’s face. The airport workers re-organize all the people by hotel and then put us back on the bus and send us back across the island to Angra do Heroísmo. We watch as several groups of people are dropped off at a 4-star hotel on the water. We are the only ones on the bus who are staying at the Angra Centro hotel, and we only know where it is because we have pulled up its location on our phones. We have to yell at the bus driver to stop and let us off. He has never heard of this hotel and has to look it up on his phone; he does not believe it is real. We are exhausted and starving and finding a gluten-free meal for Mazz seems impossible, but we have been given a voucher for dinner at a nearby café, and though the menu is only in Portuguese and on an iPad, the waiter helps us order some terrible food and it does its job of filling our bellies.
Back at the hotel, they inform us that a bus will pick us up tomorrow at 3:30pm and take us back to the airport. We are given no other information, but it is now clear that we will miss our flight from Lisbon to Berlin. Mazz spends several hours trying to get ahold of someone at Ryanair, of anyone at the airport, but it is impossible to speak to a human. She tries the chat function on Ryanair’s website, but there are so many other travelers who are furious with the airline that there are too many people for her to even get into the queue. Finally, she is granted entry to the complaint queue and watches as the number slowly creeps down from 500. Kirb gets ciders from the market next door and watches a Portuguese football match in the lobby to kill time. Our hotel is completely booked out with a teenage Portuguese football team, and they are watching football in the lobby as well. Mazz gets to #230 in the queue before it abruptly shuts off for the evening and boots her out. We go upstairs to our room, which is only slightly larger than the bed, with no pictures on the walls and only a small window that looks out to a wall. The toilet paper is empty, there are holes in the towels and linens, and hair in the shower.
Mercifully, the weather is sunny again the next day, and so we are able to spend the morning hiking around Angra do Heroísmo. Of all the places to be marooned, spending a little more time in the Azores isn’t too bad of a fate. It is the waiting around in the airport for entire days that is miserable. We hope that will not be the case again today.
We are truly shocked when the bus actually arrives in front of the hotel to pick us up. Kirb is the first one off the bus to try and get in at the customer service counter, but the counter is closed, as is the Ryanair check-in desk. There is literally no one in the entire airport to answer the questions of the plane-load of people who are deposited back into the terminal. After an hour and a half, someone comes out to explain (only in Portuguese) that a replacement flight has not been sent, and that there is nothing that can be done to get us off the island for several more days. However, if we purchase a flight on a different airline, Ryanair will book us new flights to get home. The problem is, this is Easter weekend, and virtually every flight anywhere in Europe is already sold out. We are some of the first in a very long line to speak to a customer service rep, and it takes him an entire hour to get our situation sorted out. There are no available Ryanair flights from Portugal to Berlin for nearly a week. So, we ask if they can send us to third location that does have flights to Berlin, and he says that is a possibility. Kirb has an epiphany and calls Spritzboi on the phone to ask if we can crash in Luxembourg for the weekend. He says of course we can; it is Passover, and they are making a bunch of food anyway. The customer service guy has to fight with a superior on the phone extensively to even get this approved, and the soonest we can leave Luxembourg is the following Monday (it us currently Thursday), but that is the fastest way we can get home. We are stuck at the airport until well past when they close at 10pm, waiting for another bus to another hotel. That same customer service guy comes and finds us across the street at the bar to tell when the bus is leaving. That man is a saint.
This time, they put us in a very fancy hotel with everyone else in the nearby town of Praia da Vitória. Unwilling to wait until 11pm for the free dinner Ryanair promised, we ate at the bar already, but we still receive a voucher for €36 to get food at a nearby restaurant. Kirb goes into a place next door and asks for the most expensive bottle of wine they have, which costs €16. He then asks for the owner and explains that Ryanair has ruined his trip to Lisbon and stranded him abroad for four days, and that it is bed time and he is not going to possibly spend €36. But Ryanair is going to pay all 36 of those Euros for the inconvenience, so if it is alright with him, to please say that we spent that entire amount, and then to give the remaining €20 to the waiter as a tip. He agrees.
We wake up at 4:30am to catch a taxi bus with other stranded passengers back to the airport. We fly on our own dime (€160) back to Ponta Delgada, and from there, let out a deep exhalation as our plane leaves the Azores for good and deposits us back on mainland Europe in Lisbon. We don’t have time to truly enjoy ourselves there, but we do have a 5-hour layover, which is enough time to take the train into town and eat a fancy, delicious meal at BAHR, where the sunny patio is booked but we have the dining room all to ourselves. The Lisbon airport is as chaotic that evening as any airport we have seen. We arrive in Luxembourg at 10pm, exhausted after roughly 24 hours spent inside airports in a 3-day stretch, but happy to be home. Not our home exactly, but the next best thing we have in Europe.
And then, for some reason, Luxembourg
The four of us spend every thanksgiving together, so it was only fitting that fate brought us together this year for “Jewish thanksgiving.” Jessica remarked, “Passover is all about bringing people into your home and feeding them,” so it felt like kismet. We’d never participated in a Passover Seder before, so we were excited for the new experience, always looking for an excuse to prepare and eat a feast with our friends. Sprtizboi made homemade matzoh and refrained from making leavened bread for the weekend, which we’re sure was tough for him. Jessica led us through readings in the Haggadah and explained the blessings and rituals, then we dug into a delicious spread of brisket, roast potatoes, and slaw. We were extremely thankful to have been rescued by our Luxembourgish family, taking us in when we had no way to get home.
Unlike the Azores, the weather was sunny and warm every day we were in Luxembourg, so we spent Sunday hiking through the vineyards along the Mosel river. This is where lots of good wine is grown, and it was fun to see which types of grapes the vines would eventually produce. We spent the evening drinking delicious things and grilling up arguably the best meal we ate on the entire trip, made collaboratively with dear friends. It wasn’t the original plan, but it was an excellent plan B.
There’s an Easter tradition in Luxembourg of collecting Péckvillchen: bird-shaped ceramic whistles that make bird calls when you blow into them. On Easter Monday there’s a gathering downtown where merchants sell that year’s models, so we all went to check it out before our flight. The streets were packed and it was a real scene, but none of us were quite at the point yet in the pandemic where we felt particularly comfortable in crowds. We said our goodbyes and deepest thanks to our friends for taking in two Easter/Passover orphans, and for giving what seemed like a truly cursed final week of this trip a happy ending. We went to another airport. We got on another plane. And then, we were so, so pleased to finally be home.