I like to bring local candy home when I travel, especially hard candy, and that was one of my objectives on the trip we just took to Portugal and Spain. I had a hard time finding interesting candies, though; most of the stores I looked at devoted their space to Mars Bars, Mentos, and the like – I can find those at home.

I did have a little success along the way, though; I have a small bag of “Fruit Chewy Caramels” from Portugal (made by Penha), and I’ve already written about finding the mother lode at Carmelos Paco in Madrid.

But the most interesting candy I found on the trip came from the small town of Régua – it’s a local candy called rebuçadods da regua. It’s so local the bag doesn’t have a UPC code, nutritional labeling, or even a manufacturer’s name.

I paid one Euro for a bag of nine candies; the bag wasn’t sealed, just tied, and the individual candies are hand-wrapped and hand-made. The candy isn’t super-sweet; it mostly tastes of honey with a little Port wine mixed in.

I wish I’d bought more!

Both of us managed to stay awake until after 9 last night and we didn’t get up until after 6, something vaguely like a normal schedule.

I woke up sometime after midnight and had to use the bathroom – I clearly wasn’t completely awake, though, because I distinctly remember being guided there through gilded hallways, and then when I was trying to go back to bed, I couldn’t figure out the way and had to turn on the lights briefly (Diane slept through that, if it was real).

Yesterday’s Heathrow excitement could have been worse. I had asked AmaWaterways to rebook us on the flight to San Jose to avoid the short connection at Heathrow, but they couldn’t do it; just as well, because BA cancelled yesterday’s flight to San Jose.

We took a couple of walks today, picked up the mail, and bought groceries for the next couple of days – nothing terribly taxing.

I did succeed in fixing a technical problem, though – I have a Raspberry Pi that uses a SDR-433 to decode the temperature being sent by our outdoor thermometer so I can look at it remotely. The temperature stopped being updated while we were away, and I didn’t know why. I unplugged the SDR-433 and plugged it back in to see if the program would notice; for some reason, that made the Pi reboot and when it came back, all was well.