On the way to the airport for a sad and meaningful pilgrimage that my boyfriend was about to embark on with one of his brothers, driving his grandmother’s ashes to their final resting place next to her husband, he called me and explained the following, I am paraphrasing: I wanted this to be a complete surprise, but I need your help and ideas. I want to go on a weekend trip in the next few weeks, but there are some guidelines we have to follow. 1, it has to be out of the country. 2, has to be a direct flight, less than 8 hours. 3, it has to be to a place that neither of us have ever been to before. 4, affordable and where we could possibly use amex miles. Well this seemed to be a tall order as between both of us, we have been to many places around the world. His initial thoughts were for us to go to Brussels as neither of us had been there and we both like beer and chocolate. While he flew to the west coast, I got to work and opened up google maps. The possibilities were endless, yet most of the places that neither of us had traveled to were just a bit too far. While we were on the initial phone call, I mentioned some islands that I couldn’t remember the name of but ones that I had always wanted to go to, so I looked them up and low and behold, they are the Azores and they are a part of Portugal. In the past, the islands were a challenge to get to, only accessible from Portugal and had many layovers. Recently, Azores Airlines has emerged from SATA and now flies direct from three places in North America… Boston, Toronto and Oakland. (random enough?!). I began to get excited, but he was still flying so I couldn’t run the idea by him! I composed a detailed e-mail laying out different options of flights to Brussels, Paris (because, well its Paris, even though both of us have been there), Azores, Casablanca Morocco, and even a couple of places in the US, just in case. Now it was the waiting game until he landed and could read my e-mail. He said that he had looked at places in the Caribbean too, but they were all quite expensive this time of year. Was I nuts for suggesting we fly to these Portuguese islands for a weekend and go hiking around volcanos, relax in hot springs, explore tea plantations and eat yummy Portuguese food? Maybe. Maybe I should have just found a city in Europe that we could have explored and not an island?! Maybe we could just go to a beach and relax for two days. What fun would that be?! I may have been second guessing all of my options as this weekend getaway seemed to mean more than just a getaway and I wanted it to be special and a place that if we ever wanted to go back to, we could. Even though he didn’t give anything away and kept a surprise, sometimes you just know!
He safely landed on the opposite coast and was off and driving with his brother. A little while later, an e-mail came in that said the Azores sounds like it’s the winner! Yay! He loved the idea. And off we went planning a weekend trip to the Azores for the following weekend. We also began a crash course in Portuguese so that we could try to understand and say a little bit of something. Between him speaking Italian and me, French, we were hoping we would be able to get by. As soon as he returned from his pilgrimage, we bought our tickets, arranged a hotel, booked a rental car… all booked after quick extensive research, and to Portugal we go!
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