Hello again,
We ended the last quarter with the arrival of Frederico, who I am happy to say is doing very well!
3-months already!
We start back in Brazil coming up to Easter. We had rented out the country home in Boa Vista to a nice lawyer called Charles. We were due to get the house back at the end of May, but Charles called us and proposed three options, either rent the house to him for another year, sell the house to him or if we could not agree a deal, he would return the house. We felt that he really liked the house and was very serious about buying it. So, we decided to spend a weekend looking at some alternative properties. The first place we saw was amazing, it was like an old palace, with ten bedrooms, massive garden and pool. But it was a palace in need of a king’s ransom to restore it to former glory. Here is a gallery of some of the places we viewed:
Back in São Paulo, I started having physiotherapy sessions on my shoulder with Renato at the local clinic in the mall next door. I was very impressed. We start each session with about 20 minutes of exercises, then a massage session, sometimes using a vibrating drill contraption. Then a short session of laser treatment , finishing off with the last 20 minutes of ice compression. He straps a harness on my shoulder, then connects it to a box filled with ice. Then a pump compresses my shoulder while pumping ice water through the harness. It’s great.
At the end of April, I journeyed back to the UK for a few events. The first did not work out at all. I had agreed to play snooker with my friend Keith down in Brighton. I got the train from Newmarket to Cambridge and changed onto the Brighton train. But, when it stopped at Welwyn Garden City, we were told that the train had broken down and we all had to get off. It was about 20 minutes before the next Brighton train came along. Then soon after boarding it, my friend Keith called me; his wife had been called in for an unexpected medical procedure , so snooker was off! ☹
I got off at the next stop, London Bridge, and took a picture of the Shard…
...and got the next train back to Newmarket. I was not too upset, as I was not 100% sure that my shoulder was up to a six‑hour snooker session. Instead I played some left-handed tennis with my friend Minna and enjoying walking on the famous Newmarket Gallops:
And, I finally built a new rocket, that Rosie gave me ages ago:
The following Monday, I gave the old Jag a wash, put the roof down and headed for Hunstanton.
It’s a lovely old traditional British seaside town on the north Norfolk coast, with a wonderful long beach, with golden sand. Here is Brain and Keith enjoying the view...
It is actually the scene of the crime – it is where I tore my shoulder tendon back in July 2024. For the last five or six years, my old university friends have tried to get together for a few days — to eat, drink, walk and be merry. Eleven of us made it this year and the weather was generally sunny, but quite fresh. We did manage an 18 km (28,000 steps!) walk on one of the days, which was not bad. Especially as we now have many keen bird watchers in the group and this area was very good for that. Here is a gallery of pictures from the walk:
<< THE HUNSTANTON WALK GALLERY >>
I have established a tradition of firing and trying to recover a rocket on these trips. This year was hampered by pretty strong winds, so on the last day I decided to try to risk it, and fire an old, small rocket with a medium burn motor, a C6-0. This means it burns for 6 seconds and glides for 0 seconds, before deploying the recovery parachute. To compensate for the strong wind it was necessary to point it well into the wind direction, so that when the parachute deploys, it will glide back and land close to the firing zone, in theory!
It did not go well. The launch pad has a blast plate and a metal pole made of three connected sections. The rocket fires up the pole, in the direction you have aimed it. It has never happened before, but somehow the sections disconnected before the rocket got to the top of the pole, so it took off with a much lower trajectory than planned and into the direction of the sea. After the 6‑second burn, the motor fires briefly in the opposite direction, blowing the nose cone off the top of the rocket and deploying the parachute. There is a length of elastic string which connects the parachute to the nose cone and the main fuselage, so that it should all drift safely back to Earth. But this rocket was pretty old and the elastic string broke, so the parachute floated slowly down, attached to nothing at all. The rocket probably found a watery grave!
<< THE HUNSTANTON ROCKET VIDEO >>
Next up, was a trip to York, to visit Rosie, as it was the last few weeks of her final year at York University and also her 22nd birthday. Tara and I would journey up by train from Peterborough and Sarah would get the train directly from London. Charlie and Lilly would drive up from Birmingham and we would meet Rosie and her boyfriend Vedant at the Airbnb house I rented for us all in the centre of York City. The journey was fine:
And the house was big enough for us all to have a bedroom each. We had fun exploring the city and then prepared for a dinner at a very nice Japanese restaurant, where we had a private room for our table for seven people:
On Sunday, we went for a walk along the old historic city walls:
Some more pictures from York:
On Sunday, we headed out for a final visit to Rosie’s dorm and a tour of the University.
Soon after that, I flew back to Brazil, to prepare for a very important event.
It was our wedding day 2.0! and it was on the cover of Vogue magazine!!
Wedding day 1.0 was back in October 2020, in the middle of the COVID‑19 pandemic. So why do it again, I hear you ask? In recent years, I have been spending more and more time in Brazil and my limit is 180-days per year, without a visa. So, about a year ago, I started my application for a spousal visa, and of course, nothing in Brazil is simple. I was asked to supply many documents, one of which, was proof of my divorce, which I duly supplied. Then I was informed that I had not provided this document back in 2020, when we were married. The reason for that was because nobody requested it! Grrrr. Consequently, the lawyers informed us that our marriage was invalid for this reason. ☹
So we had to do the whole thing again. We gathered all the documents, met again with the lawyers to sign the pre-marriage papers, only to discover another problem. When Carol first came to Brazil and got her first passport, they made a mistake with the date. Her passport says she was born on December 9, and her birth certificate says she was born on January 9. ☹
The solution was to find a small town registry office that does not require you to present your birth certificate.
And so, on Friday 22nd May, we got up early and the dog was shipped off to Bobby’s apartment. Carol put on a beautiful white dress. I put on a clean white shirt, smart black trousers and a dark blue Sandro jacket. Our driver André picked us up around 1:30 pm and we headed to the Fasano Hotel in Boa Vista, where we met our lawyer Edwardo and his assistant Lara for lunch at the hotel restaurant. They presented us with a box of traditional Brazilian wedding cakes:
I had a very nice penne alla vodka and we celebrated with a bottle of the hotel’s Chianti, which I very much recommend. After lunch André drove us a further 30 minutes to the small town of Ipero.
Ipero – is somewhere in the middle of the State of São Paulo. Here are the wedding pictures:
It was exactly the same number of guests as our first wedding, a total of two: Eduardo and Lara. All went to plan, and we returned to the Fasano Hotel for our (second) wedding night at the hotel.
A week later we took back possession of our country home in Boa Vista after the 12‑month let. Charles, the lawyer, had not managed to agree terms to buy the house, so we got it back. We even got a bonus: we discovered that Charles (without consulting us) had installed a very nice electric front gate, presumably to keep his dogs from escaping. It was nice to be back and I settled into a routine of swimming, to help strengthen my damaged shoulder, and tennis. I bought a new battery for my Spinshot 2 ball machine and returned to learning left‑handed tennis. We both love it there. Some pictures from Boa Vista:
In the peaceful surroundings of Boa Vista, I was able to get back to working on my restaurant review app. On the 8th of June I finally managed to release my app RestiView, on both Android and iOS platforms.
To get it:
- On iOS, go to the App Store and search for “RestiView” and download it.
- On Android, go to the Play Store and search for “RestiView” and download it.
At the moment the initial release works okay, but the look and feel is very simple/basic, which is why I have engaged my very talented, artistic graphic designer daughter, Tara, to help me make it look great and give it a more modern app feel. So I suggest you wait a month and get the improved version.
And that takes us to the end of June... Q3 starts with a return to Miami, from where we will visit Chicago, Anchorage, a honeymoon cruise to Vancouver, Utah, The Hamptons, Manhattan, and more… So don’t miss the next instalment of…
- This blog!
Take care and stay healthy!
Best wishes from Peter