A wedding at a church, outdoor café tables brimming with people, kids riding around on scooters… my little corner of Europe feels more like the “days of yore” (pre-COVID) than it did when I returned in April from Canada. We’re still masking, but 75% of the population is fully vaccinated as of this writing, events are happening again, and folks are out enjoying the last bits of summer. We stayed put this summer and didn’t go on any road trips, which is pretty unusual for us. But it took us half the summer to get vaccinated and qualify for the EU Digital Covid Certificate, two weeks after the second vaccination. We couldn’t expedite the process, so we made our way through it by working (too much, in my case). Last Saturday, I was determined to dust off my less-old camera to try and capture some final scenes of the season in a nearby town. (It’s been so long since I used the camera that it was still set on Pacific Time.) Santo Tirso, 24 kilometres from Porto, has a beautiful setting on the River Ave and we hadn’t visited for ages. In fact, I just checked and it’s been three years! The last time was only a day trip on September 1, 2018, but we were mostly in nature — on a failed mission to coax Ice into some cool water — and breezed through town. On Saturday we returned to Parque Urbano Sara Moreira because it’s a picturesque green space, and we’d remembered the riverside café from last time. We were there in the heat of the day and the park had that end-of-summer lazy feeling — the temptation to lay down in the grass and fall asleep. Some scenes around Santo Tirso, including a pond where Ice the Dog had his first experience of being hissed at by a goose: September 4, 2021Album: Portugal [Summer 2021] / Santo Tirso© Gail Aguiar | DO NOT USE WITHOUT PERMISSION
