🇨🇻 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✌🏻. You can catch Part 1 here 🇨🇻
Hello Restless Ones,
Back again this week with some pictures and another digital-postard for you all. If only I could send you all an actual postcard. Imagine?! That would be magic.
Hit the play button up there at the top to listen to it, or there’s a transcript down below.
I’ve had an influx of new subscribers this week so if that’s you helloooo 👋🏻. You can find last week’s postcard here.
📸 The pictures are at the very bottom, below the paywall this time, because it kinda feels like I’m showing you my iPhone family camera roll. So I’m more comfy that way.
Thanks for being here, for supporting the Restless vibes and for joining in the madness.
Ciao-Ciao for now,
Anna xx
P.S 👆🏻❤️ Tapping the heart icon at the top or bottom of the post means that more people will see this. It’s a gift that fills up my adventure-juju for the following week.
Postcards from Cabo Verde: Part II
A perfectly-imperfect transcript for you lovely readers:
Happy Thursday, restless people, Oh, my goodness, what in the world has gone on the past week? You know when you have those weeks of your life that actually feel like a month or even a year has passed, that has been the past week.
So for a little recap, and I know there's lots of new people following this and listening along, we're in Cape Verde, for a month with my two almost two-year-olds and a four-year-old storm and my adventurous hubster, and we are doing some island hopping.
I'm just trying to get my travel itch out, basically, because since I've had the twins, I have not traveled much at all, so this is my little travel fix, and we're hoping that the kids love it too, big family adventure.
So we're here for a month, and so far, we have spent a week on the island of São Vicente, at this place called São Pedro beach. And I think I left you last week the update was that we were in this hotel that was a little bit on the dodge side, and it has continued to be on the dodge side.
But within the first couple of days, once you look beyond the quite literally rusted railings in our little apartment, and beyond all the other broken stuff, the cupboard doors falling off, all of that, none of that matters. Once we got onto the beach - oh my goodness.
Ooof! The Scenery
And you look up and around the mountains – they’re just stunning. They're they remind me of the the Badlands in South Dakota. They're not like Alpine mountains at all. Really sharp peaks. They look like jagged little teeth going across the sky. And they've got all these lines running across them, but also up vertically as well, where you can see the earth hundreds of 1000s of years ago has just smashed itself together and pushed its way up anyway, loving it.
So, we've got mountains. You've got this stunning sandy beach going on, and we've started to get into this little rhythm… Every morning we get the kids up, we’re an hour behind in the UK here, so they were waking up super-duper early. So we were clinging on until it was light enough to get to the beach.
Our daily rhythm
So we're on the beach by 6.45am in the morning, and those first few days of seeing them on the beach run around. Wow. Storm just loved it. She lit up. Rocky's still mildly frightened of waves. But you know, we're just we're getting there gradually. But watching your three kids at sunrise run around on the beach and play in the sand, and it's this beautiful, volcanic it's like blacky, kind of gray, but mixed with a bit of golden sand. It just filled my soul on up.
And I just thought, This is why we're here, because this is not what we do. At 6:45am at home. At 6:45am at home, I'm normally starting to think about breakfast. I've got kids scrambling around my ankles, and I’m getting stressed. So I've just been so grateful.
So we've got into this little rhythm every morning, We go to the beach, then everyone goes and gets showered off in the showers (that don't really work, but half of them work and they’re full of bugs and everything). Then we take ourselves to breakfast, a breakfast that I haven't had to make, and then we go for a swim.
And then the twins have a nap. And then we do swim again in the afternoon. Then we wander down the beach again, just as it starts to get a bit cooler, and we started going for dinner at this and this is this the saving grace, a beach bar, called Morena beach bar is just this little gem.
And I cannot believe it's a five-minute walk down the beach, and it's the only thing here. There's nothing else. So, we've been going there in the evenings, and it looks like it's like Ibiza vibes. I've never been to Ibiza, but when I see the pictures, everyone's like lounging, and it's all open fronted and yeah. So that's been our little rhythm.
So some days have been just pure joy, and everything has gone well and I just feel so much more chilled than I am at home.
A split mental load
And I was trying to think about why that is, and what's gone on? I've realized that, at home, you know, the mental load is just so big, and it a lot of it is like a bottleneck with me, because I know where everything is. And I know how things work.
Whereas out here, me and Jamie are on equal footing, everything is so much less. There's less clothes. There's less going on. He knows as much as I do. He knows they've got to be Sun creamed up. He knows they've got to get the swimsuits on so we're even. We're 100% even. And actually, in fact, what's happened is Jamie is kind of leading things, and I'm just kicking back and chilling out a little bit more, which is, which is mad.
So I feel super chilled, because it doesn't all feel like all of the information that needs to be known about what's going on in the days in my head anymore, it's not spread between the two of us, so I'm really enjoying that.
And other than that, well, I'm trying to think what else has been going on…?
A supermarket trip with a difference
Okay we've been trying to get out and explore a little bit, and we've not explored as much as I would have thought we would have done. Because some days there’s that beautiful rhythm, but then there are some days that are chaos. A disaster.
And it's normally one or two of the kids are just kicking off, and every minute feels like an hour. And you know, you cannot seem to get to that flow where everyone's just happy, content and playing. There's always firefighting going on.
So we've had days like that, but I've done a couple of things. So one morning, I decided that there's not much way of getting food in this hotel, which sounds ridiculous, but basically there's nowhere way you can buy food, except for this breakfast in the morning and a snack bar. But it's open at the weirdest times, and then they just change the times every day.
So sometimes we're just, we're still munching on peas that we carried from my mum's cupboard back home, because we're just like starving little animals in our room going, please someone bring me some food!
So I decided to take Storm on a trip to I we found that there was a supermarket in the local town, which is a mile and there's no, there's not a direct road for it to it, but you can walk along the beach. And I thought, well, I'll just walk along the beach with Storm.
We've got this trailer thing that we can throw all the kids in, but I threw storm in there for the morning, dragged her the mile along the sand, put my sports gear on, sports bra on everything, because I was basically treating it like a training mission.
And then as I got up to keep getting her out to, like, pull the buggy over big boggy areas or this massive patch of grass or loads of twigs. And then we got to the point where I had to actually, hoist trailer buggy up onto the road, and get her to scramble up onto the road.
And at one point, I pretended that we got stuck in quicksand and that she had to push the trailer through it because we hadn't, but I just felt like she needed to get out and walk a bit, and she needs to be part of the journey
So we get onto this road to the local town, and all the roads out here, they're cobbled, and made with, like, volcanic rocks, basically black volcanic rocks. So, I'm starting pulling the trailer down this road, and then towards me comes this bright turquoise green…It's like a trike, a motorized trike, and this guy on it, and he says: 'Hey, I'm Clayton.'
And he pulls over, and he starts chatting to me: 'Can I help? Do you need a ride to town?'
I said, 'No, No, we're fine. I'm walking. I'm enjoying it.'
And then basically him and his mate started chatting and trying to sell us a turtle tour, because they do turtle tours here. But I'm saying to him, 'Look, the kids are too young. They don't even want to put their face in the water at this point.' And then they just said to me: ‘Why have you come to the town like, why have you come here?'
And I said, 'Well, I just wanted to come to the supermarket.'
'The supermarket's tiny. It's just a little shop.'
'Oh, that's fine. I said, I wanted to come out….’
'What to see the culture?'
'Yeah, I want to see the culture!'
And he said, 'Okay, okay. Cool.!’
So when I got into town, I would have never found the supermarket if he hadn't of come out from under the shade of a nearby tree where he was hanging out with all the other boys, all the local fishermen. And he took me up the road, this guy, to the supermarket.
And it literally was like someone's house, and you walk in and a woman was stood behind the counter, and there's these three walls of food, and I can't speak any Portuguese.
(And also, the language here isn't just Portuguese, it's a mix. If you can speak good French, they'll speak to you in French, and if you can speak Spanish, they'll they'll understand Spanish, but they speak a mix, especially on this island, of Portuguese, mixed with French and then a few English words thrown in, along with some Creole stuff.
Anyway, it's really cool.
Fresh Tuna, anyone?
So I panicked a bit in this supermarket. Didn't quite get everything we needed, but I was just pointing at things on shelves. But did have the most delicious tuna in a can. Which tuna in a can is not normally nice, but apparently had been caught like fresh from that bay, and that's what we'd seen some fishermen out in the mornings.
When we go out on the beach, there's a boat, a couple of boats, that come out with a guy swimming beneath the water at the front of the boat, and he's obviously looking for the tuna in the water, really quite close to the shore. And then he tells his mates in the boat that there's a tuner there, and they quickly do a donut ring in the speed boat and drop a net and then catch the tuner. It's fascinating to watch.
So anyway, that was my excitement. A trip to the supermarket with storm one morning came back absolutely knackered. I thought, 'well, that beats a trip to the local Gloucester Co Op, doesn't it?'
My nervous system going wild
And then the other thing we did is this morning, we went into Mindelo, which is the city, like, 20 minutes up the road. And I was reading loads of guide books about this place, and it basically says, 'you haven't seen Cape Verde unless you've seen Mindelo. It's the cultural heart.'
And so I took Storm in there for the morning.
And I have to say, when I got back, I was absolutely cream cracker, because I'm a so unused to traveling in foreign cities where I don't speak the language. I haven't done it for ages a) because of the kids and b) I’m unused to traveling anyway, because I don't get away much.
And so to be in a city where you don't speak the language and everything around you is like this assault on the senses. I love lots going on, but I'm sort of, but I was on high alert. It was so weird. I had to talk myself down from this ledge of, like, 'Anna, relax.' And I don't think Storm picked up on it at all, but I was constantly trying to get myself to relax.
And it took me about half an hour and an ice cream stop, to actually bring my nervous system back down and think: 'Anna, you're in a city in a foreign country, and it's okay. It's going to be okay.' But I thought that was a really interesting observation that I that was that was way outside my comfort zone, and I had to kind of talk myself down from the ledge of it. It just being so unfamiliar, and me unused to it anyway, right?
That is enough chit chat for this week. Blimey, that's a long one for you, but so much, so much goes on, honestly, in my head and in the real world. It's crazy. But all in all, we have absolutely loved this little place.
I wish I could say, 'please come here and come to this hotel, but do not come to this hotel if you have young kids, because it's not a good place for young kids.' And but there are lots of other people who don't have young kids, and I think that's great, but the actual location and where it is, and this island and the mountains are on the beaches is just beautiful, and the people are friendly, and yeah, the vibes, they're so relaxed, so laid back. It's crazy.
The next stop…
So tomorrow, we're getting on a plane.
It's an hour flight to Santiago, which is another island where the capital city is, and I've just started thinking whether I'm a little bit bonkers, taking us all to capital city. But hey, you know we're doing it. It's happening, and if we don't like it, we'll change the plan somehow.
But that's the plan for the next week or 10 days or so. We'll see how we go.
So wish us luck for that next leg. And excitingly, the twins are going to turn two years old in that city!, So we’ve got go and find them a cheeky little birthday present somewhere along the way.
Okay, I hope you enjoyed that. Catch you next week. Bye!
📸 Pictures
A selection from the McFamily album…
