[not mom] The most exciting thing to happen on Friday

This is on my not-mom filter, because she's afraid of heights. If you are too, you might want to skip this story.

Ever have one of those driving dreams where the road turns into a roller-coaster and you're zooming out over the ocean, barely making sharp turns, road getting narrower and narrower, waves crashing below and seeming to come dangerously close, driving faster and faster in order to avoid some nameless horror behind you, maybe missing a corner and falling to your doom?

If you have an urge to recreate this, have I got the road for you! It's the 1km road to the Ponta do Arnel lighthouse at the east end of Sao Miguel island. According to Google pedometer, it's 500 meters vertical, but I can't say I believe that; it was definitely steep, but not 30° steep. Anyway: my nightmare sales-pitch continues:

All this can be yours, just add your own nameless horror. We chose "followed by a van" on the way down this road, and "destroying the rental car" on the way up, a particularly effective horror because it wasn't at all obvious it would be waiting for us at the bottom; the way down was just white-knuckle steering around crazy switchbacks and barely seeing the road beneath us (Look! it's the ocean! we're driving into it from hundreds of meters up!). And of course nowhere to turn around, even a tiny car like the ours. The lighthouse itself was cool; and the views from it were pretty great too. Deep breaths, agreeing that was scary but doable.

On the way UP, though, you got your choice of horrors: "destroy the clutch" "destroy the tires" "stall and roll backward into a wall that might not be high enough to not fall off the edge" and the old favourite, "steer into a wall that might launch you to your doom."

The mechanics of getting our Fiat Punto (nicknamed "Squeaky") to climb the grade were... challenging. So challenging that dan, who is a better standard transmission driver than I, gave up after repeatedly stalling out in first gear- with squealing tires- on the second hairpin curve. So there we were, no idea how to get out- and Lo our savior appeared, a guy who was leaving the lighthouse. Dan and I had been joking earlier in the day after all of the roads with hairpin curves, that he had been driving on the "advanced" setting on the video-game. And there really were a lot of those roads on this beautiful island. Well, this guy had his "expert" chops. And he had played this level of the game a million times, enough to get the near-perfect score in somebody else's underpowered car. So with almost no language in common, the guy clearly understood our situation, and agreed to get behind the wheel of Squeaky. He did one run from where we were below the second curve, and was about to stall out, so he put on the brakes (using all three of his feet) and backed us all the way down to the lighthouse (eek).

All the way back into a parking space. I wondered, is he going to get out and leave us here? But no; he was just psyching himself up for the Boss Battle in somebody else's car.

And then he gunned it, went straight for the wall of the first turn, swung through, gunned it again up the middle of the road (I don't know about dan; I was in the front passenger seat going "ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod" quietly to myself). (OK, maybe not so quietly). He made the second curve and almost stalled going up the next incline, but Squeaky kept going until it leveled off a bit. I think there was one more really steep one and our savior stopped on a mild (10 degree?) slope and made questioning motions if we could take it from there. And that we did.

I made sure he had beer money as a little thanks before he walked all the way down to his car, though.

And we agreed we wouldn't try and visit any more lighthouses at all, on this island.

Afternote: dan found this panorama and guide to the lighthouse and path. Sadly, we took few photos that include the road; it just didn't occur to us at the time.

The Azores

So, as I mentioned, going to Portugal was just as cheap including a stopover in the Azores, so we did that last Thursday through Sunday before dan's conference in Porto this week.

Recommended vacation? Yes! It's the most tropical place I've visited, though it's only in the subtropics. It's amazingly green and alive. Nearly every rock face on the island is covered with moss, and most of them are then covered with grass or something flowering. The island we were on, São Miguel, has about 140,000 residents (half the population of the 9 islands) and it's been lived on continually since the 1400s. Stone construction is common; just about all the wood we saw was in some stage of mossiness and I can't imagine wood structures last long.

From the airplane, you can see these green tall fences that look like shrubbery, and that's what they are- to keep larger animals in or out, including people. There are a lot of farms on São Miguel- besides tourism, the economy runs on fishing, dairy, and livestock exports to the mainland. Driving around the island for three days, we were stopped a few times by cattle being driven down the road, just enough times that it was still charming; especially when one driver tried to pass around them in the other lane and was promptly stopped by a few strategic cattle (I suddenly imagine a Critical Cattle demonstration, mooing "whose streets? our streets!")

Renting a car was the right idea. There were tour-busses, but dan was happy to drive us all over, and the roads are usually well-signed (except they really need a few more "steep road" signs, maybe including one or two "don't even try it"). The island is 65km by 15km, and we were able to tour most of the bigger towns and attractions in three days. It would have been even nicer if we'd had Thursday to tour as well, but Hurricane Nadine would have made things difficult for us even if we had landed, so three days of visit is all we got.

There is a new superhighway from Ponta Delgada in the south-west to Nordeste in the north-east. It means a traveler could make a day-trip out of visiting all of the towns along the north coast, returning on the highway instead of having to turn back just halfway. We took the winding and twisty roads along the coast, which had so many gorgeous views (more dramatic than Cape Breton- don't take away my citizenship for saying that, Canada!) After making it to Nordeste, and an ill-conceived attempt to view a lighthouse down a steep road, we headed back to Ponta Delgada for the night.

There are beautiful (and free) attractions all over the island, that are kept in remarkably good condition given the amount of work it must take to trim back all the aggressive greenery. My favourite visit was to a roadside waterfall and park called "Ribiera dos Caldeirões" near Achada in the north, with lots of beautiful flowers, old water-mills and many levels of stone aqueduct.

There was also Furnas, a town centered around hot springs and bubbling pipes coming out of the earth. DId I mention the Azores are situated on volcanic mountains? They are at the union of three continental plates, which are moving outward very slowly. It's amazing that the only net effect on the surface today is a few hot springs; apparently in the 1800s somebody discovered a brand new island, which he claimed for England; only to have the next explorer report that it had disappeared underwater again. Fun. Anyhow, Furnas had outdoor hot springs which were awesome, and there were claims of three indoor springs to go and bathe in, only two of them were closed and the third one was empty and creepy, so we didn't bathe in it.

And there was a neat little hike at Calderia Velha, around the middle of the island where a waterfall and hot-springs-warmed water coincided in a pool. Again didn't swim, but it was a nice hike.

We spent a morning driving to the west corner of the island, up Pico da Cruz, only the weather was foggy enough that we could see nothing but white mist. We descended into Sete Cidades, a town centered on three lakes (gorgeous views from above- or so we're told) and then had a lot of twisty roads back along the coast.

The city of Ponta Delgada would have perhaps been more interesting if we had been there on a different set of days: Friday was a regional holiday, and many shops are closed on weekends, so we mostly only visited restaurants. There were a few museums that weren't open. We went to a pineapple greenhouse, which was a "must see", but touring dozens of nearly identical greenhouses wasn't so exciting. There was pineapple liqueur, though. Oh! And Sunday afternoon, I came across a 4x4 truck rally, which was really great for people-watching.

There were also requisite visits to cafes, where we had some tasty sweets though I fear I didn't do nearly enough lounging in traditional Portuguese style. But I tried. I think will try for more lounging in Porto, where we are from Monday through Sunday.

I hope to post photos once I've done some processing, which may happen after I am home again.

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPad.