The How to get to the Fifteenth Day in Portugal

In the prior post I covered who, what, where, and when but never explained how. I think I need to cover that a bit, then I'll tell you about our adventures.

As it turns out travel isn't free, and most activities that will grant you large sums of cash quickly are illegal. So being the law biding citizens we are (mostly), we had to find different means for our exploration. This is the perfect time to have a Heather, she is very good at research and planning. With her head down and fingers thrashing a keyboard at phenomenal speeds, she found an option. We could exchange labor for room and board using a few websites, namely http://www.workaway.info and http://www.helpx.net. These websites provide a platform for "workers/helpers" to meet "hosts." The jobs vary from anything to anything, but a large percentage of them are for trade skills, gardening, cleaning and teaching English. This option made our dreams very possible, eliminating paying for food and accommodations lowers the expense substantially. The one other constant larger expense is that travel itself, planes, buses, trains and cars. To afford that we pretty much liquidated all of our assets, cars, furniture, jewelry, electronics, clothes, and literally anything we could sell.

There are some inherent drawbacks to traveling this way, but for every negative there is a positive. A few examples may be:

You have to work, but you get to work in new places and gain new skills.

There is less privacy, but the opportunity to meet new people from different cultures. In most cases we will be living with natives, so we'll get to know their culture much more intimately than we would staying in hotels. Lastly the chances you do get for privacy are much more appreciated.

All these things created the opportunity to do what is we are doing, and today that is sweeping some floors in Portugal. Of course that was after the standard mishaps of traveling by air.

With all of the first batch of traveling behind us, we found ourselves getting off a bus from Lisbon in a city called Peniche (phonetically "Pen-neesh," if you were curious). From there we got into a car with a man named Jorge, our new boss for the next few weeks and a swell fella. He took us to our final destination his B&B/Hostel only a few kilometers way in Baleal (http://www.paradise-baleal.com/).

Basically our job is to keep things clean and occasionally assist with other various projects (I built a fence/partition), but that's not the interesting part. We work with two other girls, Suzy an employee and Alina (I'm sure that's not how you spell her name) another volunteer like us. Suzy is Portuguese and Alina is Latvian and this is just the beginning of the nationality parade. Working in Baleal has ironically taught us more about other nations than about Portugal. Those other nations thus far are Germany, Latvia, Australia, Slovenia, the U.K. and Sweden. This is something probably inherent to working in a hostel.

As it turns out Baleal and Peniche are huge tourist destinations for surfers. Two of those tourists were a couple of 19 year old Australians named Scott and Travis. They became guests the first day I worked, and friends over the course of their stay, much like most the tenants that have been here. We did a few things with them like sightseeing, going to a surf competition, and not the least of which surfing. Well I went surfing, Heather was trapped behind a computer screen getting our TEFL (teach English as a foreign language) certificates. I'm glad she jumped on that grenade because apparently I really enjoy surfing, though I don't have sponsors yet.

Left to Right: Travis, Marcus, Me and Scott
Photo taken by Anjte (Marcus's Mother)

Aside of surfing we've only done a thousand other things and seen a few cool places. Far to many for me to cram into sentences so instead I'll let pictures show you some things we've seen. Try to ignore the time stamp.

Heather working on or TEFL certificates.

This is all just the tip of the iceberg. There will be more posts more frequently so I won't have to try to sum up two weeks and change in one post. Also try to forgive any errors my proofreader is asleep.

Thanks for reading.

T. Cullen Morris