Coming up for Air
Surviving the silly season(s)
So that’s what they mean by the silly season...how did it suddenly become September?
It’s been both exhilarating and exhausting, but we couldn’t have asked for a better summer start to the latest stage of our off-grid Portuguese adventure.
And this week we enjoyed something which a few months ago would have been utterly terrifying in the face of an rapidly expanding overdraft...a night with no guests.
As the kids started to drift back to school and the summer holidays started slowly coming to an end, a gap in our arrivals calendar allowed us the luxury of coming up for air, getting some rest, and starting to think beyond the next breakfast, lunch, dinner (or all three...on the same day).
We ended the summer with a flourish...dinner for 16, wine tasting for 12, a short but first proper retreat and then a very welcome little lull.
Somehow – for two months – we’ve kept the treadmill of arrivals and departures going without too many mess-ups or laundry-lacking panics.
Our personal washing production line is tested enough by all the towels, so we outsource our sheets to a fabulous laundrette half an hour’s drive away in Vila Nova de Milfontes.
Only once amid the madness did we reach for the iron, despite having bought three times more sheets than we needed, and thankfully we were just four pillow cases short before the overworked launderers saved our skins.
Some would call it bad planning, we call it learning by doing: we set out at the start of the summer with a ‘bring-it-on’ attitude to running an eco-luxe lodge.
In June we didn’t even know if anyone would come, let alone test our laundry logistics.
Even with the wonderful Oda spending six weeks helping us through our first season – crafting cocktails, clinking wine glasses and making meals – it’s been a blur of guests, welcome tours, beach and restaurant advice and many, many lovely people.
We have the best guests hands down and haven’t had a bad one yet...and the great reviews continue to flow in.
Krishna has been cleaning like a demon, turning around rooms in a few short hours to keep all the people coming and going.
We now understand what tourist season means: everybody working in the bars, the restaurants and the tourist lodges of Odemira is absolutely exhausted.
Some places have closed already, either to take some late summer sunshine themselves, or to sit in a quiet, darkened room with a stash of sedatives.
Others are powering on...knowing it’ll be quieter in the off-season and sprinting towards the finishing line.
But as the families are returning home from the beaches, the walkers hiking the Rota Vicentina long-distance foothpath are back in force...extending the season well into the winter and with it the workload.
We always planned to be open for much of the year – that’s why we installed underfloor heating – but didn’t expect the clifftop trail and the historic inland path which cuts through the bottom of our valley to bring so many more visitors to the area.
Now we have the time to properly promote our three night stays for the walkers looking for a little more luxury: a daily, backpack-free hike followed by a dip in the pool, a slap up dinner, a new wine each evening and a hearty breakfast to set them up for the next day.
We’re also getting all the logistics in place for our painting retreat with Ed Sumner at the beginning of October.
The paint and the canvases has arrived, the winemakers are ready and from the WhatsApp group, the attendees appear to be getting excited!
We’ve have had a cancellation...so there is space for one more person (or two people sharing) to join...please get in touch...here’s the info: it starts on October 3rd.
Suddenly the sun is setting earlier, the mornings and evenings are that little bit cooler and we even had some rain last week.
It was very much welcomed by the plants who’ve suffered from my only occasional irrigational interventions, and I was so out of touch that the remnants of Hurricane Erin took me totally by surprise.
Guests had been mentioning how the red beach flags had been flying and the ocean was in turmoil, but even the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina didn’t draw my usually weather-curious eye to the satellite images.
As I was being interviewed on BBC Radio 5Live recalling memories of reporting on the storm hitting New Orleans (on BBC Sounds here at 1.39’00”), I was utterly unaware that one of the largest hurricanes ever recorded was churning around the Atlantic, flooding New Jersey and moving Iberian beaches.
Only in the last few days have I realised just how much sand has moved and changed the shape and flow of our favourite beaches as it usually does only in the Spring.
Thankfully Erin didn’t make landfall – but its last band of rain which hit the UK and barely clipped our coast gave me a little reminder that the long summer days of endless solar power are coming to an end.
It robbed us of a clear lunar eclipse (although day 2 of the blood moon was still pretty special), but more importantly the batteries went flat and our power went off.
I’ve always been obsessed with monitoring our solar system, but for some reason I didn’t turn off the pool or water treatment pumps, ran washing machine-loads of towels all day, left a load of lights on and then started the 3-phase industrial dishwasher before the sun came up.
Thankfully our guests were checking out and the gas cooker provided all they needed for breakfast, but I was a little shell-shocked by my own complacency...and that’s definitely a good thing.
Our systems have been remarkably robust, aside from the little power cut and the occasional water “pump cavitation.”
Whether it was a leaking pipe or a pump “running out of curve,” we would have loved a little more attention from our water engineer, but for an off-grid system and an average of 18 people a night, it’s been impressive for season 1.
After our quietish week guests are starting to return to Vale das Estrelas and September is already starting to look busy.
We love all the readers and listeners taking advantage of our special blog-following discount...and by way of apology for my six-week absence from Substack, we would like to extend that offer into October.
We’ve happily eroded our overdraft and our young business is going well, but we could really do with your support to help us through winter.
If you go onto our website and booking engine here and then enter the promotional code BLOG25 you’ll get a 15% discount for the rest of September and the whole of October (but don’t tell anyone).
In my old life, the silly season was the summer lull when everyone went on holiday and we needed to find quirky stories to fill the airwaves.
I’m not sure “silly” is the right word for the mad world and relentless news cycle that continued throughout the summer, but that lull is certainly over...it’s been quite a week.
Israel bombed a new country; American political tension exploded with an assassination; France, Japan and Nepal all lost their prime ministers; Russian drones entered Polish and Romanian airspace; and NASA (maybe) discovered life on Mars.
Exhausting isn’t it? And those were just the top stories.
But this news hound now listens to classical music, we still marvel every evening at our amazing view at orange time and pink time, the reorganised beaches are beautiful, and you really can get away from it all.
Come to the Valley of the Stars: we’re in the country, on the coast and off the grid. And above all, it’s quiet here.
Wonderful & delighted for you both to read the success that is happening
What an adventure it has been
We missed you guys this year but great to hear that all going so well! Well done and big hugs from the Clayton-Venturas in Cape Town!