Author: Rudy

Woke up at around 6:00am. Still dark outside. Windy. Raining. The electricity in our apartment is still off. No hot water. No shower this morning. No coffee either. I’ll just get dressed, close up my carry-on suitcase, say goodbye to the Driedgers,  and go downstairs and head to the airport. 

MaryLou is sitting on the couch reading her Kindle in the dark. She goes to wake up Dave to come say goodbye. Dave tries the breaker panel again — and voila! the power comes back on! Oh well — I’m set to go. We say goodbye and I head out to the car. 

The A22 freeway has very few cars on it — especially this early in the morning. It takes me just about an hour to get to the Faro airport. I park the car and go to the rental booth. It’s out on the parking lot and it’s raining pretty good now. The attendant isn’t there yet — it’s quarter to eight and he’ll be there at eight. When he arrives, he checks my car — checks the fuel, walks around it, looks for dents — all okay, good to go. I take my big golf bag and my small rolling suitcase out of the trunk, strap on my backpack, and walk quickly across the parking lot to the airport. By the time I’m inside my shoes and pants and luggage is sopping wet. And I’m cold. 

The airport info board says my flight is delayed by more than an hour — no one at the check-in yet. So I sit down, log on to the wifi, and read my emails. I’ve got lots of time. 

When I finally get up and go to the check-in gates I see that all three lines are backed up. WAY backed up. I go to the end of the shortest line and for the next hour plus, I’m shuffling my luggage ahead, 6 inches at a time, just like all the other impatient passengers. By the time I finally reach the desk, more than an hour later!, the flight is already boarding! My big golf bag gets checked-in as an oversize bag — I ask to have it checked through to right to Winnipeg so I won’t have to handle it again. The attendant asks if I want to check my smaller ‘carry-on’ bag as well, gratis, just to Amsterdam. Gratis? Well sure! By now there will be no room in the overhead bins anyway. Plus, I’ve got a whole afternoon in Amsterdam to kill — might as well spend it standing in the crowd around the baggage carousel!

The flight to Amsterdam is okay. Budget airline (Transavia) for this first leg, so no food, no drinks, and a very full flight. And sure enough, it takes nearly an hour after our arrival in Amsterdam for my little ‘carry on’ to come flipping out onto the baggage carousel. No problem. I’m in no rush.

It’s an hour later here than it was in Portugal, and it is after 4:00 pm by the time I finally get my bag. I eat a late lunch at one of the airport cafes (sushi and a beer), and then go stand outside where the free hotel shuttle busses come by. It is FREEZING cold outside. The reason our flight was delayed by over an hour this morning was because they’d had SNOW here in Amsterdam and had to de-ice the plane before flying it down to Portugal to pick us up. 

I haven’t packed enough sweaters and jackets for this. I DID have some winter gloves along, but they got checked through to Winnipeg in my golf bag. There’s no way I’m taking a train to downtown Amsterdam to spend an evening checking out the red light district in this weather! So I elect to go directly to my hotel when the shuttle bus shows up at 4:15.

Check in. Clean up. Log on. Catch up with what I’ve missed on CNN — and now I need to write TWO blog posts. So I write yesterday’s entry. At around 7:30 I go across the parking lot to the McDonalds and order a flat white coffee from the McCafe. Did I already mention that it is freezing cold outside?

Back in my room I finish my second (this) blog post. I have the TV on, listening to that idiot Trump spouting off about how he’s not afraid of the NRA and how they really need to get more guns INTO schools so that they can ‘protect’ the children! Boy, I sure haven’t missed much in the world of US politics!

It is 10:30 pm by the time I load up my movie, “The Shape of Water”, on the computer and settle in for an ‘evening matinee’. 

Final Thoughts:

Tomorrow I head home. Alex will pick me up at the airport, hopefully at around 8pm if all works according to plan. I’m looking forward to going home, but I’m very glad I made this trip. I’ve already said how grateful I am to Dave and MaryLou for inviting me to join them and for making me feel welcome. This Portugal trip was something that Sue and I talked about a year ago, something that we planned to do, something that Sue booked for us last July when she already wasn’t feeling great, but was hoping to do once she ‘got better’. And even after we knew that Sue wasn’t going to be making this trip, I didn’t cancel it right away. We didn’t know how long Sue would be around — when asked how long she expected to live she said sometimes she thought she might not make it to Christmas, but other times she thought she might still be alive to see the spring. And whenever I thought about what was ahead, about how it might all turn out, I too didn’t know whether I’d be going to Portugal — either way.

Well, now I know and I’m so glad that I came. It’s not my style to sit around and be sad. Sure, there have been quite a few times on this trip where I’ve thought about what might have been, and many times that I’ve been so sad that Sue wasn’t there to share the experience. And many, many times when I’ve really missed her. It’s all still a bit surreal. But (as Jerry Jeff Walker says), A Man Must Carry On. You just keep putting one foot ahead of the other. You keep going forward, one day at a time. With this trip to Portugal, that’s what I’m doing. I’m carrying on. 

So, buckaroos and buckarettes, until next time (which may be just a couple of weeks away), as they say in Portugal, “Ciao!” It’s been good talkin’ to ya. I’ll see you around.

The last full day in the Algarve started out not so bad. The rain that Dave kept warning us about didn’t really materialize. Yes, it was cloudy, and yes, there were some drops of rain from time to time, but really the day was pretty good! 

We started off kind of slowly. A lazy breakfast. The usual coffee and yogurt and bread with peanut butter and jam. MaryLou did a load of laundry. After I spend about an hour packing my bags, including my golf clubs, I sat around and worked on a crossword puzzle. Dave was checking out the late night talk shows. And in between we all did a bit of reading, too. MaryLou went for a walk. We had lunch. 

Okay, it’s too nice out there for us to just sit inside and do nothing all day. So we decided to take a drive — go check out the Lagos Zoo. There are splashy signs and billboards throughout our area advertising this zoo. Dave had often mentioned that he’d like to go see it. Well, today was the day. 

I took my big golf bag downstairs and put it in the trunk of the car, ready for my early morning departure tomorrow. Then we got in and headed north. The drive took us right past the Espiche golf course where Dave and I had played a few games earlier in the month (when the prices were still ‘discounted’ winter rates). So today we turned into the driveway and showed MaryLou where we had been. By now MaryLou had heard so much about Dave’s ‘miraculously’ finding his sunglasses in the thistles of this course, she thought she might right a book (or at least a column) about it. So we stopped for a short ‘photo shoot’ of Dave (and me) standing in front of the clubhouse, holding the aforementioned sunglasses. Click. Done. Next stop?

We continued down the road and wound our way through some small (and visibly less well-to-do) villages on our way to the zoo. When we got to the zoo, the parking lot had LOTS of room for us to park. We walked across the muddy parking lot and across the road to the big entrance to the zoo. Twelve euros for an entry ticket. I looked over the wall — a big pool with hundreds of small turtles crawling around and a couple of ducks swimming in it. A few (empty) cages and displays. The big sign at the entrance listed the animals to be seen here. Hmmm… Not many ‘exotic’ animals here — no lions, tigers, camels, elephants, giraffes, etc. No, they listed parrots and birds and hedgehogs and the most exotic animal was a crocodile. It looked like we would be the only visitors if we went in — but we didn’t. We got back into the car and kept driving. 

Now the fuel gauge was dinging ’empty’ and we needed to find a gas station so we could put a few dollars in before I take the car back to the rental company at the airport in Faro tomorrow. That turned out to be more complicated than we might have guessed. We ended up WAY west of our place, near the Santo Antonio golf course before we finally found a gas station at a large ‘Inter-Marche’ grocery station. We put in fifteen euros and then decided to have a coffee here before heading back home. We parked the car and went inside. Pastries and espressos. 

We drove back to our place and parked the car. A few minutes later we were all back in our respective stations. TV on. Waiting for happy hour. Dave and MaryLou both nodded off for a bit, although I’m sure it wasn’t the exciting day that tuckered them out! Happy hour. Our last G&Ts together. 

At 7:13 it was time to go out for supper. Although I really liked the Chinese food we’d had a few weeks ago, I thought we should really try the British pub that is just across the road from our place. Mushy peas and Guinness pie. But when we got there we learned that they are not open for meals in the evening — only for lunch, at least until the ‘summer’ season begins. Okay, that settles that — we’ll go for Chinese.

And we did. And it was good. And when it was done we went back to our place. MaryLou really wanted to play Parcheesi or Rummy Cube or some game like that — she’d found the game under our coffee table earlier today. But Dave wasn’t interested and I didn’t know how to play it, so we ended up watching a Beatles documentary on Netflix. That put MaryLou to sleep in her chair within 10 minutes. Dave woke her when it was time for our night snack — Venetian ice cream and a small port.

I was not at all tired and had intentions of writing a decent blog post — something to finish up the series — about how much fun it had been, how good it was for me to do this, how incredibly kind and generous Dave and MaryLou had been (and are), not only to invite me to join them, but to make me feel welcome and put up with my whining about the weather and my fussing in the kitchen and my walking too fast on the walks, etc. I was going to write a big long THANK YOU post to the Driedgers. They are GREAT FRIENDS to me. But right then, the three of us sitting there in the living room in front of the telly, POW! the breaker went and the power was off. Well, we’ve blown that breaker on a daily basis for the entire stay, so I just pick up my phone and turn on the flashlight and go reset the breaker. POW. It won’t reset. Hmmm.. Maybe the power is off in the entire building? Maybe that big stormy wind that is coming off the ocean and rattling our windows has knocked out the power? But we open the door and look out into the hallway — and there are lights on and the elevators are working. Dave determines that it is our breaker panel. He keeps trying to reset it over and over, but it pops right back off. 

Okay, that’s that. I gotta get up early tomorrow — I would like to leave by 7 at the latest. It’ll take me an hour to drive to the airport in Faro, and then I need to return the rental car and check in and make sure my oversize golf bag gets on the plane and the flight leaves at 10:30. I’m going to bed. We all did. In the dark. With the wind howling outside.

No blog post tonight! (so I wrote this the next afternoon)

I got up early today — yesterday’s forecast predicted rain here, beginning in the afternoon. Our 2:40 tee time looked like it might be too late for us to get one more (dry) golf game in. So at 7:30 I called the course and switched our time to 8:40 am. If we could finish our game in 3 to 4 hours we’d be home, high and dry, by noon.

The wind was cool and the waves on the beach below us were big and white. So I packed my hoodie, my poofy vest, and my rain jacket. When we checked in at the clubhouse, Dave asked the lady if she thought we were making the wrong call. She shook her head — and said ‘there will be rain’. Not too many other cars on the parking lot, and we only saw one other golf buggy anywhere on the course. 

But we’re Canadians, and we’re tough. And besides, tomorrow’s forecast looks worse and the day after that I’m outta here. We’ve got to make this work.

First tee: Driver hits it high and right, but it rolls down the big slope and it’s playable. Second shot lands on the green. Putt, Putt. Par.

Second hole: Good drive, a bit right, but playable. Second shot ricochets off two trees and lands on the green. Putt. Putt. Putt. Bogey.

Third hole: Good drive, but a bit left. Wedge shot to about 2 feet from the hole. Par.

Fourth hole: Short drive. Good second shot. Wedge onto the green. Putt. Putt. Par.

Fifth hole: Par three, 90 yards, green is WAY down below us, surrounded by bunkers and anything that’s not on the green rolls way down into bushes. Tee shot misses the green left, ball is at the edge of the bush. Wedge over the green, ball lost in the bush on the other side. Drop a ball. Hit it back over the green, ball lost in the bush. Drop a ball. Okay, this isn’t going so well — why am I even doing the play-by-play? Nobody wants to read this! Nobody cares about my GAME. Tell ’em what they wanna know, why don’t you…

But how’s the weather? Well, the light rain we had for the first 7 or 8 holes wasn’t too bad — the cool wind was drying us off as fast as the rain was wetting us. But then the rain got a bit more serious. And we were getting quite wet. Okay, VERY wet.

By hole 15 I was REALLY looking forward to the finish. But we persevered. And although Dave could barely (or not at all) hold onto his club after each swing, we would NOT throw in the towel. We couldn’t throw in the towel — we only had one towel between the two of us, and we needed it to dry the seat on the golf cart so we wouldn’t get our pant seats all wet. Okay, our pant seats WERE all wet anyway.

We skipped the after-game beer and loaded all our wet gear into the car and went back to the apartment. Because it was our last game we took all our golf gear up to our fourth-floor apartment so it could dry out and I could pack it all for the flight home.

I ate the sandwich I’d made in the morning, and Dave boiled up a cup of tomato soup for each of us. All our heaters were on ‘high’. And then the cleaning lady came in and did a quick cleaning of our bedrooms (but skipped the living room and kitchen because we were in there). I don’t blame her for the ‘quick’ job — I had my golf bag emptied and every chair and table now had golf paraphernalia and wet clothes draped over it. And the wind was HOWLING around our doors and windows and the rain was pounding the windows and all that was left for us to do was to sit in our comfy chairs and watch TV. So eventually I download the Oscar-nominated best picture “Get Out” and we watched that. Interesting…

We had happy hour and then at around 7pm we headed out for supper. We made a quick stop at the SPAR to get some groceries for tomorrow, and then went across the street to one of the two Indian restaurants. We shared three mains and had a fine meal. 

Shortly after 9 pm we were back at our stations in front of our TV. Dave was blasting away at his iPhone Scrabble game and MaryLou was getting the latest news from her Facebook friends. I was busy adjusting my load of laundry — making sure that each piece some hot air from one of our space heaters. 

Dave found ‘The Thin Red Line’ movie on a Dutch channel on our TV and we watched that and had our nightly ice cream and port. And that was the end of Day 21 here in the Algarve. Looks like my last day here will be just as wet!

I went to bed early last night, and I woke up late this morning. I made coffee and then sat down to catch up on my blog — I was too tired to do that last night. We had breakfast late — and then had to decide on a plan of action for the day. Should we go to the zoo? Or just hang around at home? What about the weather? Rain in the forecast? Well, we talked about it so long that it was almost irrelevant. But Dave found a cinema within driving distance that was showing just about ALL the movies that I still needed to see before the Academy Awards next Sunday, so that’s what we decided to do. 

And then it was time for lunch! So we made sandwiches and had lunch. And MaryLou skyped with her dad. At 1:00 we finally left the apartment and took the 1 hour drive to the big fancy mall near Ferreiras, in the town of Guia. We parked the car and found the cinema. The mall is the largest we’ve seen so far, and of course the cinema turned out to be at the OTHER end from where we’d parked the car. And since Dave and MaryLou have seen all the movies that have been out for more than 3 days, we had to find something that they could watch while I watched ‘my’ movie where the start and end times would align. Not so easy. We finally decided that I would go see ‘Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri’ while the Driedgers would go see the cartoon ‘Ferdinand’. But when I went to buy my ticket the girls behind the counter informed us that Ferdinand would be in Portuguese only — after all, it’s a kids movie and kids can’t read subtitles. So the Driedgers decided they would go shopping in the mall for the next two and a half hours while I went to see my movie. Which I did. 

One very unusual (and annoying) thing about movies in Portugal is that they insist on having intermissions about halfway through the movie. Literally, halfway through the movie! So there’s a very tense scene in my movie, with a operatic song and a guy running up the stairs to attack someone and BOOM, the film abruptly stops and the lights come up and the screen announces a 7-minute intermission. Just like that! 

Anyway, the movie was entertaining and well-acted. I met the Driedgers sitting in some comfy chairs just outside the entrance. We went to get some ice cream cones from a shop in the food court nearby. And then we went downstairs and picked up some things we needed from the humungous grocery store on the first floor before Dave drove the car back to our apartment.

Happy hour when we got home. Dave and I watched the snooker finals. MaryLou worked on completing one of her eight daily tasks — today she worked on drawing a comic strip. And then she made a salad and Dave fried up the burgers we’d just bought and we had a late supper. 

We were just finished eating when I got a FaceTime call from Alex and Max. They are at the C’mon Inn for a long weekend — and looked to be having a great time.

After supper we watched the final round of the Honda Classic golf tournament on TV. At ten o’clock it was time for a small glass of cherry liqueur and a dish of our fancy ice cream. And that was how we spent the twenty-fifth of February this year! The forecast for tomorrow says rain in the afternoon — so we just may have to switch our 2:20 tee time to the morning. I’ll let you know how it all turns out tomorrow. See you then.

Well, if the weather forecasts are right, today just MIGHT be our last golf game here in the Algarve. The golf courses are all hoping for some rain — it’s been unusually dry here this winter and the fairways are looking a little brown. But for tourists like us, the weather has been great for golfing, and we’re hoping for one more rain-free day after today.

Dave and I drove to the Santo Antonio course for our 9:50 tee time. We both think this is the best course of the three we’ve golfed, and unlike Espiche and BoaVista, it’s just not very busy here and we always get on right away and golf as a twosome. 

I know you are all wondering how my tee shot on the first hole went this morning, but I’m afraid my game isn’t any better than the Canadian hockey and curling teams’ games were in the Olympics. You’d think that Dave’s rule that we can have 2 tee shots on the first hole would be of some benefit to me, but it only means that I get to lose TWO balls right off the bat. And so, gentle reader, I will NOT bore you with the hole-by-hole analysis of my game today — no, let it suffice to say that I finished with a score of 100, and that’s not the same as 100 PER CENT. But the large cold beverage that awaited us at the 19th hole was as delicious as ever.

We got back to the apartment at around 1:30, and Dave fried up some hot dogs for our lunch (already a ‘red-letter’ day!). MaryLou took off just about as soon as we got home — I think by now she’s more efficient working on her eight daily tasks WITHOUT listening to Dave’s full-volume highlights of the Jets game and the Colbert Report on the computer.

I doddled around a bit, and then at around 4pm I put on my walking shorts and went for a quick bit of exercise. I stopped on the promenade and found a couple of size 5 t-shirts with ‘PORTUGAL’ on them, and ‘negotiated’ with the old woman who said she “really needed the money” until we both felt we’d been ripped off. I stuffed the bag with the t-shirts into my ‘poofy vest’ pocket and continued on my hike. I didn’t want to be gone for much more than an hour (and miss happy hour!) so my plan was to run up our hill to the big obelisk at the top — twice. That would get my heart pumping and my shirt sweaty and make me feel better about eating those hotdogs for lunch.

Along the way I pondered some more on those interesting chimneys on top of most of the buildings here in the Algarve. MaryLou had ‘googled’ it this morning and learned that they are unique to this region. They are called ‘Algarve chimneys’, and although they look like they might be a reminder of the Arab influence on this region, they are not ‘Moorish’ at all. No one really knows who designed the first one and why they continue to be so popular here. It turns out that they are mostly decorative, and not functional at all. I took a few photos on my way up and will post them here for your enjoyment.

Speaking of posting photos, I’ve uploaded a couple of pictures I took the big obelisk at the top of the hill. After running (well, if not running, at least climbing as fast as I could) up and down the hill twice, I sat down in the shade of said obelisk to catch my breath and give my heart rate a chance to return to normal. There was an elderly couple already perched on the ledge at the base of the obelisk. We began a short conversation — they told me they’d been coming to this place since 2001, and marvelled at how things had changed since then. I could hear by the woman’s accent that she was German. The husband didn’t speak English, so she would translate some of our conversation to him. Then at one point I answered one of his questions directly, in German. Oh ho! Der kann auch Deutsch sprechen? He asked me from which part of England I was from. I corrected him: Nicht von England, but from Kanada, wo es sehr kallt ist. And so I had to explain why it was that I could speak German (and not French). And then it was time to say ‘Auf wiedersehn’ and run back down the hill or for sure I’d be late for happy hour.

I got home just before Dave got back from the grocery store — with the fixings for G&Ts. After cooling off a bit and a quick shower — and snapping a few pics from my bedroom window of the sun setting in the west — we sat in the living room and waited for the clock to reach 7:13, the agreed upon time for going downstairs for pizza. Dave had a short snooze and I looked at my photos (and a few of Max diving into the pool at the C’mon Inn in Grand Forks, which Alex sent me). 

There are actually TWO pizza restaurants on the main floor of our building. Side by side. Which one should we go to? We chose the first one, the one where the woman inside always smiles at us whenever we walk by. We sat down at a table and the pizza maker guy comes over to take our order. We order a litre of sangria (red), and two pizzas and one salad to share between the three of us. The Pizza Nazi doesn’t get it. “You want one special and two pieces? How many pieces do you want?” I seems he uses ‘pieces’ and ‘pizzas’ interchangeably. After a lengthy discussion the complicated order is sorted out and Mr Pizza gives us a final lesson in how to order ‘pieces’ the correct way for the next time we come here. He goes into the bar and starts squeezing fruits and crushing in ice cubes for our sangria. After a short wait the smiley woman brings us our two pizzas. She is very friendly and the rest of the meal is as pleasant as it is delicious. 

Back upstairs the snooker semi-finals are on TV. MaryLou is soon snuggled up in her blankies; the excitement of the match on TV doesn’t keep her attention for long. Dave and I sit and watch for a while until we can stand it no longer — and it’s time for our nightly ‘Venetian’ ice cream dessert and a glass of port. The end of (another) perfect day. I nod off a few times before the best of eleven snooker match is decided — and finally drag my weary butt off to bed. My day is done and I am fast asleep by 10:30. For the first time since I started writing my daily entries, I conclude this day without a blog post. I’ll do it tomorrow. (I DID it tomorrow — and since both of my faithful readers are in another time zone they won’t even notice!)

Today was a truly ‘lazy’ day. The only thing on the agenda today was a dinner in Lagos with some friends of Dave and Marylou. So I slept in until around 8:30. I got up and made coffee and we had breakfast. After breakfast we all sat around for much of the morning. I went out into town just before noon, looking for a souvenir t-shirt. None to be found. Maybe I’ll try again on the weekend — there may be a few more ‘beach’ shops opening up this weekend.

I had lunch and fished out another page from the stash of Winnipeg Free Press crossword puzzle pages and started working on a sudoku. Dave and Marylou went for a little drive out to where we’d seen a whole bunch of storks sitting up in their nests on the top of tall poles. They returned shortly before 3pm and Marylou immediately set out on a hike across our ‘mountain’, heading to Lagos where we were scheduled to meet Wilf and Karen, Winnipeg friends of the Driedgers who happen to be here for the next week or so. Marylou wanted to get a head start on the walk, so that she’d arrive at the meeting point around the same time as Dave and I, who apparently walk too fast for her.

As we walked along the cliffs today, we spotted a couple of hang-gliders hovering over the coastline, catching the updraft and then flying back and forth above us. We caught up to Marylou when she was just down from the cliffs, and making the big climb up the sidewalk into Lagos. 

We met Wilf and Karen at the bridge and were just walking back together along the main road in Lagos when we passed by a restaurant that had a menu that interested us. Dave had been waiting to try the Portuguese specialty dish, ‘cataplana’, so that’s what we ordered. Cataplana is a popular traditional seafood dish here in the Algarve. Fish and seafood, like prawns and clams, are cooked in a copper cooking pot called a Cataplana. And it was quite good, too!

We said goodbye to Wilf and Karen — they are staying at a B&B in Lagos — and caught the hourly bus back to our place in Luz. Dave found the channel that was playing the snooker championships from Scotland, and we had our evening glass of port. We were in bed before 11. Tomorrow is another golf game for Dave and me at the Santo Antonio course.

A quick breakfast again today, and then we high-tailed it out to Santo Antonio golf course for our 9:20 am tee time. We’d been told that Thursdays could be busy, so we were prepared for a round that could be a bit slower than our last one here, which was about 3 hours. But it really didn’t look very busy to us.

I was a bit unlucky right off the start: I took out my one yellow Taylormade ball, hoping that I could play and entire round with it, then smacked it too far right with my drive and couldn’t find it after that. Oh well, if that’s as bad as it’s going to gets…

There was no one behind us at all, so we never felt any pressure. And it looked like a couple of holes ahead of us the course was wide open. So the only problem was the two groups ahead of us — they were holding us up on EVERY hole. Finally, on the eleventh hole, the guys ahead of us let us play through. Whew! at least we didn’t have to watch those guys duff their shots along the fairway ahead of us anymore. That left 3 ‘walkers’ who certainly were not in a hurry either. They held us up for another 3 or 4 holes and finally let us play through on about the 16th hole.

It was 1 o’clock by the time we were sitting on the deck with our cold post-game beers. But it had been a fun morning — not hot, but not cold either. We golfed in shirtsleeves. We’ve got one more game scheduled for Saturday at the same course.

We drove home. Marylou was out in town somewhere. I FaceTimed with Alex and Max for a bit. Then I went out for a fast walk to the neighbouring town and back — 90 minutes to do almost 10 kms on the rocky pathway. When I returned we had happy hour at the apartment.

At around 7:00 pm Marylou made Denver sandwiches and we had supper. Then we sat down in the living room and watched “The Florida Project” which I rented from iTunes. 

At around 11:00 pm we were all done — finished our movie and our glass of port and time to go to bed.