A Wild Goose Barnacle Chase

Beach day! We all awoke excited for the beach, which meant keeping the kids’ voices at hotel-appropriate levels was quite difficult in the wee hours of the morning when they woke (Melina, paraphrasing Frozen, told me, “Mommy, the sky woke me up!”).

The buffet breakfast in our hotel dining room was just what we needed, including even scrambled eggs, a rarity in these parts. The girls devoured their yogurt, eggs, bread and jam, and about half of an entire watermelon. They would have eaten more but we figured we should leave some for the other guests. Then it was off to the beach!

The beach was just as perfect and the water just as cold as yesterday, and we had an amazing few hours. We spent a long time digging a pool for the whole family to sit in so that the sun could warm the shallow water a bit, and it was heavenly. The girls teamed up to collect some of the perfectly sea-smoothed rocks that dot the soft sand and used them to decorate the walls of our pool. I told Diane, “It is a work of art!” Her very serious answer to me was, “No mommy, it is not art. It is a pool.” Duh.

After the sun baked us for a while we ventured into the waves for only the few minutes that our bodies could bear it, and just as we were headed back to the sand we watched as a dog trailing behind a jogger stopped, sniffed, and took a huge dump right on the wall of our pool. Well. So much for the work of art.

To escape what was now a “doggie toilet” the girls and I took a walk on the beach until we came across some more unleashed dogs. Melina was excited to announce that, “Mommy, look, they’re hugging!” and I didn’t correct her but we turned right around and headed back.

We played a while longer and then dried off and rode the funicular that scales the cliff side to the town of Sitio above. The views were amazing, so we planted ourselves at a seafood restaurant and ordered a feast, plus Fanta for three girls and wine for us.

Our Rick Steves guidebook talks a lot about eating percebes, or goose barnacles, when in Nazare. According to him they are a local favorite for munching at bars, and Portuguese ladies sell them on the side of the street everywhere you look. So clearly, it was a goal of mine to munch on some goose barnacles. We hadn’t seen any yet either on menus or the side of the street, but I had heard Sitio had them everywhere. Not so. The ladies were there all over the main square but they were all selling nuts, and of all things on this scorchingly hot day, sweaters. Sweaters, sweaters everywhere. They were all over us trying to get us to try on sweaters, which we not only couldn’t imagine wearing, wouldn’t have even touched for less than 15 euros.

From the balcony where we ate we scoured every kiosk for those darned goose barnacles, but they were nowhere. I started to convince myself that the buckets of yellowish round things were barnacles, but Zach wasn’t blinded by wishful thinking and knew that they were of course, beans.

Anyway, we finished our giant vat of noodles and cod and shellfish as well as our entire bottle of wine, and stumbled into the gorgeous catholic church and the shrine covered in blue tiles marking the spot where ages ago a hunter chased a deer to the edge of the cliffs when he had a vision of the virgin Mary that stopped him from running off the edge. We pondered the story, especially since there is no vegetation whatsoever in the area, and you would have to be completely blind or in the middle of texting a friend to not realize that the ground ends abruptly and there is nothing stopping you from falling to your death in the waves crashing against the boulders far below. We all decided that Mary must have been saying, “Stop, you idiot!”

The buzz from our wine and the heat led us back to the hotel for a much needed family nap with Nick Jr. cartoons on the TV in Portuguese. After that it was more beach time, of course. When our tummies began to rumble again we continued our search for goose barnacles to no avail, so settled at another restaurant for dinner. In Portugal it is commonplace for a waiter to bring you some small plates of food that you have not ordered, and if you take them you must pay for them, but if you don’t want them you turn them down immediately. I’ve become so accustomed to automatically waving away the bread, cheese, and olives when they inevitably arrive that I almost didn’t look at the plates our waiter brought and said, “Nao, obrigado” when lo and behold we saw what could only be the elusive goose barnacles on the plate in his hand! Hooray! The waiter gave us a tutorial on how to tear the fabric-like skin just above the purplish claw to get to the chewy and salty bit of meat inside. Zach is convinced they are the weirdest looking things we have ever eaten. Even so, we devoured those creepy-looking little suckers, and even Diane was begging for more. Between those and the vegetable soup and ah-ma-zing grilled sea bass, it was another successful seafood meal in Nazare.

We capped off our day with gelato while watching the sun set over the waves and chatting with a young man born and raised in this town, who has lived in other countries but felt the call to come back home. From where we were sitting, we couldn’t imagine a more persuasive call.