One of the greatest things about being a K-12 teacher is having Summers off. Don’t let any teacher tell you otherwise. Some teachers work during the Summer, and will tell you that it’s only to earn extra money because teachers are underpaid, but as a career teacher myself, I think it has more to do with teachers feeling guilty for having Summers off.

Personally, I never suffered from such guilt.

The only downside to having 11 weeks off for Summer (now it’s been whittled down to ten and, in some cases [horrors of horrors] even less) is that you can only go for month-long bicycle tours during Summer months, battling heat, tourists, higher travel prices, and heat (or Winter if you head further south).

Having now retired (sorta/kinda) your humble blogster is now freed up to frolic during “working months.” Like April and May, for instance. I head out tomorrow for a ~month-long tour of Portugal and perhaps a smidge of Spain.

I sense that I am possibly supposed to feel guilty about “admitting” this to you, beloved BB reader, but my substantial lack of human emotion extends beyond the whole “getting Summers off” guilt trip, well into a complete disregard for any guilt I am supposed to feel while cycling places like this:

while you do like… work stuff.

If you makes you feel any better, I will have to do a bit of work myself during the trip, sandwiched between the daily bike jaunt, local delicacies, walks along beaches and Douro River hills, and the occasional vinho verde. Nothing is perfect. Still, the chance to spend good time outside the Summer months is pretty darn exciting to me, such that I don’t really know how much Better Burque blogging I’ll be doing the next month or so.

It is possible the “muse” will strike me to report from Portugal and such, and readers are, of course, encouraged to completely ignore such posts, ones likely to include exciting topics such as “It rained today,” “Why can’t it stop raining?” and “Maybe tomorrow it will not rain.” If so inclined, I promise to mainly just post photos and keep the bike tour OCD prose to a minimum.

While I’m gone, if you would be so kind as to utterly overthrow Albuquerque’s car-centric culture, convert all of Coors and Montgomery Boulevards to seemingly endless pedestrian malls, and construct a bike/ped tunnel under I-25 at Silver Blvd. connecting UNM to/from downtown, I would very much appreciate it. If you wish to write about such achievements at BB, throw me an email (they have email and associated technologies in Portugal, something that comes as a shock to many, including my mother) and I’ll be happy to post it in the growing chasm between posts here (except for those “from Portugal” posts I already warned you about.

Enjoy the month; I’m thinking I will, at least on days in which it is not raining (although it is actually fun to ride in the rain, at least until you stop and stand in a pension foyer dripping water all over the owner’s imported rug). Will sit on American soil to again post about this and that in a few weeks. Promise, even in Summer months.

Até mais tarde…