Saturday Photo: Cow Hazard on São Miguel

As I enter the last week of work on Making Waves: The Portuguese Adventure I'm back reviewing photos I've taken over the last ten years to refresh my memories. This was taken on the highway that runs east along the south shore of São Miguel in the Azores. The island is a big producer of dairy products--when I was in Lisbon last spring, the supermarkets were full of Ultra High Temperature treated milk from São Miguel--and cows are everywhere.

A little farther down this road I had to brake suddenly when I came around a curve to see a herd of cows clopping along the road. It so unnerved me that I didn't even think to take a picture.

The flowering bushes on the hillside to the right are hydrangeas--hortensias in Portuguese--that were planted as hedges to divide fields decades ago and now have naturalized. Very lovely.

Note: I've promised Making Waves to Véhicule Press by Tuesday, April 5, but there certainly will be more work, so I'm bound to have more posts about it before the publication date which will be sometime next fall.