Ben & Kathy’s Excellent Adventure

Welcome. This is where we’ll be posting from the year we’re spending overseas: Paris first, then Barcelona and the Algarve, settling into Lisbon as a home base for a few months. The plan has us in the Azores in July. In August we hope to head for Iceland for the August 12 eclipse, with some time in Ireland, possibly, “on the way”. A short trip back to the States to see family, ride in the Tour de Cure charity ride for diabetes, and catch up with our various doctors. Then back to Lisbon for whatever’s left of the year.

Each of the posts here is built around a Google Photos album. In the beginning, as we’re in tourist mode, there’s a post every day or two, but once we’re in Lisbon things will slow down a lot.

We’ll be adding descriptions to some photos in the Google albums. You can see these at the bottom of the photos, but if you click on the circled “i” at the top right you can see more about the photo, including the location, if it was recorded.

In addition to the place by place posts, we also have seen a wide variety of spectacular plants and flowers. We didn’t want to overload the photo albums with these, so they mostly have their own albums. Still need to work adding descriptions of the strange and wonderful things we saw. The Seek app was great at identifying them, but since it’s actually designed for children, it’s not easy to get the data out.

For the full trip — every post we’ve written, in order, leg by leg — see the Itinerary. To follow a particular thread, the Themes page lists every tag with a click-through to all the posts under it. There’s also a complete list of posts at the bottom of this page.

Note that Ben has been using Claude AI in cowork mode to build this out. Any errors should thus be blamed on poor Claude, not Ben. And sometimes there will be mistakes that we didn’t catch on our editing pass.

This is also a work in progress, so check back and you’ll find things have changed.

Glad you’re here.

— Ben & Kathy

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