Lost in Lisbon (Mostly Found)

Fenwick Hale had never left the country before he turned fifty-eight, and he planned the Lisbon trip the way he planned everything: with a laminated itinerary and a mild dread of the unknown.

The plan lasted until the first taxi. The driver spoke fast, the street signs spoke faster, and Fenwick spoke only the three Portuguese words his granddaughter had written on an index card.

That was when he remembered the Soundcore P31i translation earbuds his daughter had slipped into his bag. He pressed them in, asked the driver a question, and heard it come back in English a moment later, slightly stilted, completely understandable. The driver laughed and pointed at a bakery. Fenwick ate two custard tarts before checking in.

The hotel bed was the second discovery. The sheets felt like the ones he had at home, which he found out was because he had bought them at home: the Mellanni sheet set he had packed in a fit of nerves, because he did not trust anyone else's thread count. He slept ten hours.

By day four he had made friends with a waiter named Duarte, two retirees from Ohio, and a stray cat. By day five the laminated itinerary was folded into a bookmark.

He sent his granddaughter one message: I have lost the plan. I highly recommend it.

Back in the real world: the Soundcore P31i are Bluetooth earbuds with a real-time translation feature that works through an app, and the Mellanni set is a 4-piece microfiber sheet set with deep pockets. The story is fiction; prices were what I saw on Amazon on Oct 8 and can change.