Verbatim

Hold on to your hats, but Andy and I went on a REAL vacation—like, on a plane with passports, just like in the old days! (We’ve taken only short driving trips since covid…) We went to the Azores! And if you are feeling like you recently heard of the Azores in the news, that’s because Hurricane Gabrielle showed up there just a few hours before we were supposed to fly back home yesterday morning. Luckily our flight was delayed only 3½ hours, and then we were on our way.

Before I tell you about the trip, I wanted to mention something I’d never heard of but learned about on TikTok (!): If you are a USian traveling overseas, you should download the MPC (Mobile Passport Control) phone app for your flight home. It lets you bypass even the people waiting in the Global Entry line! It takes less than a minute to set up, and then you whiz through US customs—we waited maybe 30 seconds in all! (The woman on TikTok said she has even told people waiting in the Global Entry line to download it right then and there and then switch to the MPC line!) Go to your phone’s app store and look for the MPC app from US Customs and Border Protection (CBP). It’s free.

Well, we had the most wonderful week! I was surprised to learn that the largest of the Azores islands, São Miguel, has an international airport—it’s about a 5-hour direct flight from Boston! That made more sense when I saw on the map that the Azores are much farther out in the Atlantic than I had imagined—something like a 2½-hour flight from Lisbon. Anyhow, even though it is the largest, it’s still quite small—40 miles by 9 miles—and so very doable. We rented a car and easily explored most of the island.

The scenery/landscape/terrain/whatever you want to call it is just breathtaking—mountains, valleys, gorges, volcano craters, lakes, and lagoons, plus ocean all around. There are miradouros (scenic viewpoints) everywhere. Some have lots of signage and even a little parking lot, while others you just happen to come across, but all of them are just unbelievably beautiful. And the lushness can’t be adequately described—GREEN GREEN GREEN everywhere, and lots of trees and flowers that I couldn’t identify. Many smaller roads are wall-to-wall hydrangeas, although we were just past peak blooming season. Here are just a few photos, although they barely do justice to the real thing.

This is in the northwest, where the Miradouro da Vista do Rei offers a panoramic view of the volcanic crater that is now home to the Blue Lake and the Green Lake (see?!):

And a little farther down, from the Miradouro do Cerrado das Freiras:

And all the way down:

I think this is the Miradouro Lagoa de Santiago:

In the middle of the island is Furnas, home to lots more active volcanic stuff, including numerous steaming geothermal swimming pools (we went in one!), and also geysers:

The drive out to the northeast corner, Nordeste, was absolutely spectacular. I kept making Andy stop the car so I could get a photo:

This is the Miradouro de Santa Iria:

And that day we also visited Ribeira dos Caldeirões, a gorgeous botanical park with waterfalls:

We also soaked for an hour in 100°F mineral hot springs, and I dug my toes into the black volcanic sand at a few (ocean) beaches, where we watched surfers. And everyone we met was soooo nice! I remembered that from our trip to Lisbon some years ago—they’re friendly and knowledgeable and helpful, with no “attitude.” But once again, I found the Portuguese language positively confounding to understand! I have pretty good French, Italian, and Spanish, so I could identify lots of words on signs, menus, etc., but I could understand nothing that I heard. It just sounds so different from the other Romance languages! But no fear, because everyone speaks English there, even in the tiniest villages—including seemingly all the European tourists we met. It always impresses me when, say, a Portuguese waiter and a French tourist can communicate in English, or a Portuguese hotel clerk and a German tourist, or whatever.

Summer is the high season, and we were very glad not to be there when it’s overrun with tourists (and hot); even so there were occasionally 10 or even 20 people at some of the miradouros we went to, and we were told that it’s almost unmanageably crowded in August. So I think September/October is ideal, or else May/June, which is when my chiropractor and his wife went (that’s how I got the idea!). The temperatures were in the high sixties and low seventies every day. It does tend to rain at some point almost every day, so you’ll want to take along your raincoat as well as sunglasses no matter what the weather looks like in the morning when you set out! On our way to Furnas, the Miradouro Pico do Ferro was 100% fogged in when we visited, but on our way back at the end of the day it had started to clear up up, so we stopped again and were rewarded with this splendid rainbow!

We stayed in Ponta Delgada, the main town near the airport, but our hotel was at the marina, about a 15-minute walk to the restaurants downtown. That allowed us to have this lovely view from our balcony of the ocean and boats and also be out of the hubbub and nightlife of the main downtown area:

How about the food, you ask? Absolutely wonderful. The Azoreans really pride themselves on taking advantage of their local foods, like amazing cheese (there are cows everywhere on the island!), wine, pineapple, tea, and of course fish. They are very serious about responsible stewardship of the seas. We ate fish every night, and these were not the varieties we have in Boston. We ate bluemouth rockfish and triggerfish and forkbeard and ray and amberjack and blackspot seabream and, my favorite (to say and to eat), cuckoo wrasse! One restaurant in the marina was exceptionally good—we ate there twice, on our first and last nights. The lengthy catch-of-the-day menu on the blackboard was so overwhelming that the waiter took us out back to the kitchen to show us all the actual fishes and describe each one in great detail!

Our hotel had a lavish breakfast buffet every morning, with fresh cheese, butter, fruit, beautiful pastries, natural yogurt and granola and smoothies etc., and the “Samurai” preparing all types of eggs to order. I fell in love with the presunto (Portuguese smoked ham—think Spanish jamón or Italian prosciutto) wrapped around wedges of perfect cantaloupe. We did not need lunch on any day! While I’m talking about our hotel, it was far more luxe than I had expected—the kind of place where the valet fetches towels and water bottles for you on your way out for the day. We even took advantage of the spa—on the day before we left, after fretting all morning about the impending hurricane, I had this 90-minute treatment: “Body scrub with green tea, sea salt, fresh mint, and lemon, followed by invigorating massage with Azorean laurel.” Reader, I had not a care in the world after that…

And here I am relaxing at the hotel’s rooftop bar, which we visited every day around 5pm for a cocktail and to recap our adventures.

We saw and did a lot in 5 days (more than I’ve mentioned here), and most of it I’d happily do again anytime, but there is also plenty more that we didn’t get to. I would be thrilled to go back to São Miguel.