Postcards from Cabo Verde: Part 1

🇨🇻 In a break from the usual long-form written posts, these are voice-memo postcards from a month-long island hopping trip to Cabo Verde, travelling with three young kiddos✌🏻🇨🇻

Hello Restless Ones, and Olá from Cabo Verde!

Here’s the first little update for you from our month long travels with three little kiddos, to the islands of Cabo Verde.

Hit the play button at the very top to listen to a voice memo that sounds like something I might leave on a mate’s WhatsApp.

Or you can read the transcript below the pictures.

Enjoy and catch you with another update next week!

Big love,

Anna xx

👆🏻❤️ P.S Tapping the heart icon at the bottom will help more people see this post, plus it automatically sends good vibes over the Atlantic to Cabo Verde. And you shall received sunshine back. ☀️

Transcript for the Reading Gang:

It ain’t perfect but hopefully you get the gist…!

“Hello, restless people. Hello, I am a day late in giving you an update after having my week off for Christmas, but I think, I hope you'll forgive me, because we have finally made it to Cape Verde!

I'm on this island called São Vicente, and I am looking out at palm trees. There is a breeze flowing, there is a sunset going down, and it's calm.

But it did all not start this calm.

Okay, so basically, before we were due to leave to come here, we had this massive plan of how to get all the kids to the airport, which, of course, is a bit tricky when you've got two, you know, two kids that are almost two, and then a four year old.

So you need all the car seats in the world.

And our car basically blew up over Christmas. Well, kind of didn't blow up, but the there's a leak in the radiator, a crack in the coolant. I mean, I won't go into geeky details, but basically it stopped working completely, and we can't drive it.

So then the first challenge was, how on earth we get all of the kids and us to London to get on the plane?

So we ended up with this Planes, Trains and Automobiles plan, and we managed to swing into action, got everyone ready, got to leave the house, and we sat in Nanny Annie's car, who is Jamie's mum, because she's part of the plan to get us all to the train station. We've gone in two separate cars to get to the train station. And I was like, right, okay, everyone ready?

And I feel this massive wave of relief at having actually just left the house. It feels phenomenal. And, okay, great, everyone's good. And I just turned around and I looked at Jupiter in the back seat, and she's just sat there smiling, and she's got on a pair of wellies. And I said, Why is Jupiter wearing wellies?

And no one seemed to know why Jupiter was wearing wellies. And then Jupiter went, ‘Jupiter did it’. So Jupiter had decided to put her own shoes on. And thank goodness I looked back, because otherwise she'd be wearing wellies to a really hot place off the coast of Africa right now.

But anyway, so that was the first thing that cracked me up. And then basically, the way we did the flights is, so we took off from a Heathrow, and I think it's a two and a half hour and a three and a half hour flight. And rather than do that all in one day, we decided to do this stop over in Lisbon, which actually, to be fair, was a good plan.

We've got to do it in a one-er on the way back. But I think it was a really good plan that but the kids were all out of whack. First flight went all right. It actually went really smoothly. I couldn't believe it. Last time we flew with all three of them was a family holiday last May, and that was absolute carnage, even with my parents on the plane like there was not on the moment to think.

But on this plane journey, both the twins managed to nap, and I actually managed to read about three pages of my book. So we were winning it live on that one.

So we did a stop over in Lisbon, and then we spent the night there at this hotel near the airport. Of course, this is an airport hotel, and it was, I think it billed it as a six minute walk from the airport, which, when you have three children who all want to walk / want to be carried for half a second and then put down again, is the most epic journey.

So we had an epic journey to get to this airport hotel, very posh, and a lovely hotel near Lisbon airport. If you ever need one, let me know, because this one was very, very posh, the kind of place that was actually a bit too posh, because then I was worrying about the kids smashing stuff. I mean, straight away we got to the outside of the outside of the hotel and Rocky's trying to pull the antlers off of a reindeer and Storm’s, found a giant bauble, and is licking it, all of that stuff.

But then today, we did the second leg of the journey, and we did this three and a half hour flight, and it started off absolute chaos. I just thought, how am I going to possibly get through this?

Because I couldn't get through 10 seconds without one of the kids sitting still. They were wriggling all over the place. And then Storm started to 'go'. Now, if Storm, four year old Storm starts to go, that is a mega volcano of meltdown coming.

But anyway, then it all turned around, and the second half of the flight was just, was actually, really, was was breezy, and I just had this moment where the twins were sleeping Storm, we stuck storm on the screen, which I was holding off for as long as possible, to stick her on a screen, because obviously you don't want screens as much as you can in life, but we do do a bit of screen time every now and then.

And I was trying to wait until the second half of the journey, because then I could give in and cave to the screen, and it was like downhill from that point on.

So I got her on the screen, got the twins to nap again, and I'm reading a couple of pages of my book, and I just I this just really lovely feeling of feeling really connected as a family, and just thinking about all this extra time we've spent together, and I'm feeling really much closer to Jamie, because normally he's out working much more than me. And so I'm usually feeling like the weight of everything's on my shoulders.

But now, the way we are on this trip so far, I'm actually feeling quite sort of supported and and quite just, yeah, I mean, don't get me wrong, my anxiety is still through the roof in certain places when there's three kids running in different directions, but I'm definitely a lot more chilled than I would be, I'd say, on an average day at home. So that's weird.

And then so we got this, this three and a half hour flight, and everyone's a bit wrecked. And then we land in at São Vicente....

So the reason that we're on this island that some of you might have been to Cape Verde, but basically, there's all these islands and islets, and there are two really big touristy islands that people go to, and there's lots of package tours that go there, and all inclusive, beautiful white sandy beaches.

We're going to do that bit at the end, the white sandy beaches bit. but actually, I want to try, and if I'm going to come somewhere, I want to see what is Cape Verde actually like.

So we're on Sao Vicente, because there's a town called Mindelo, which is supposedly the cultural capital. And so the idea is, (I mean, whether this is going to work out or not, I don't know) that we can take a couple of trips into the city and just get a little bit more of a flavor than I would from reading it through a book.

But what actually that's meant is that this hotel we’ve picked — it's a it was a bit of a dodgey one, and I said to Jamie, this is the one out of the three places we're staying that I'm the most worried about, because the reviews basically say, 'oh my gosh, this was an amazing place 20 years ago, and I came back last year, and they have changed nothing in 20 years like not a lick of paint!'.

And we got here and we pulled in, and I just had this wave of, 'oh my goodness, have I just bought my family to this boiling hot, windy place and to this hotel that looks like it's falling apart at the seams?'

So I had that wave, and Jamie looked at me, and I looked at him, and I was thinking, Oh, Mummy, what have you done? Anyway.

But we got settled in. We got into our room, and it is definitely it's a bit dodge, I'm not gonna lie, but there are way more people here than I initially thought, like there's a couple of other families here, it's so low key and so relaxed, and we we're in the middle of nowhere, but we did manage to spend the afternoon in the pool, and then we had a lunch at this, snack bar place, and there's a warm breeze going and the sunsets going down tonight.

I'm feeling a lot better about it, but it is definitely a little bit on the dodgey side. For example, we can't let the kids out on the patio, because, I can't even say this... we can't let them out on the patio..., would you call it like? Is that what it's like, patio.. a balcony, that's it. My brain!

I can't let them out on the balcony because the railings have rusted to the point where they should not touch those railings or they will hurt themselves. Okay? So we're going to be here for a week.

I will keep you updated and let you know how it goes.

And fingers crossed, this doesn't turn out to be one of the worst decisions I've ever made. Other than that, we're here. We're spending time as a fam and I do not have to make everyone breakfast tomorrow morning, winning at life. Okay, all right, catch you next week. Bye!”