OUTSIDE OF DALLAS - Dana Loesch strides with purpose in chunky black unlaced boots. Past the wrought-iron chandelier and red upholstered dining-table chairs that evoke some medieval castle. Alongside the "predator wall" of horned creatures (mostly fakes), then a leopard-print banquette that seems only slightly smaller than a compact car.

She was once the punk-rock chick with her head shaved and a nose ring. She was the Ozarks kid, who hewed to her family's Democratic Party roots, volunteered for Bill Clinton's presidential campaign and voted for Al Gore in 2000.

Two decades later, she is a scourge of the left, operating from a high-end home broadcast studio in this 7,500-square-foot, gated manse appointed in what she likes to call "Goth Liberace" style. Her undisclosed location is so closely held that she's been known to ask visitors to sign nondisclosure agreements lest she be found by haters from her days not so long ago as the caustic, alternately reviled and adored, face of the gun lobby.

She slides casually into her anchor's chair, accustomed as she is to producing an avalanche of content - the highly rated national radio program, the simulcast, the television show on Pluto TV, the podcast, the newsletter, the best-selling books.

It takes just seconds to mic her up - a screen pulsing in front of her, a rack of firearms from one of her sponsors on the wall - and she's ready to launch into a radio program that has positioned her as one of the leading contenders to assume primacy in the fabled 12 to 3 p.m. Eastern time slot left open for the taking by the death in February of Rush Limbaugh.

She is 42, slender, with penetrating dark eyes and a sharply defined jawline. By now she's gotten used to being called a "gun hottie." She dismisses the label as an attempt to diminish her and undermine the fact that even though she relishes talking about gun policy, the overwhelming majority of content she produces is about other topics, including election law, foreign policy, gender identity and criticism of pronouns used by transgender people, to name just a few.

As the seconds tick down to airtime, Loesch's husband, Chris Loesch - her abundantly bearded manager, studio designer and theme-music developer - walks in and sees something amiss.

"What happened to the grenade?"

Once the disarmed prop has been positioned in camera view, it's showtime. In St. Louis and Indianapolis - in Kansas City, Mo., Las Vegas, Richmond, Va., and so many other places - car radios and streaming platforms will be tuning in at various times throughout the day.

An audience, estimated in the multiple millions, listens as she channels "flyover country" grievances against the "coastal elite" whom she paints as devotees of "Cuban-Indonesian fusion restaurants, appletinis, juice bars, and SoulCycle." Legacy media organizations - which she has accused of loving mass shootings for the ratings - are a favorite target. She was on it when CNN host and fortunate son Anderson Cooper speculated that insurgents who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 would be "going to go back to the Olive Garden and the Holiday Inn they're staying at, and the Garden Marriott."

"That was just some snottiness," Loesch told her listeners.

She connects with listeners by deploying a polished delivery, citing a blizzard of data, then pivoting for effect to the cadence of her backwoods youth. It's an approach that has driven her ascendance: She recently was named the sixth most important person in talk radio by the industry bible, Talkers magazine, witha roughly estimated audience of 6.5 million a day, a figure that is difficult to calculate with precision or confirm, but would be larger than many cable news programs.

Lately she's been hammering mask mandates. In an interview, Loesch (pronounced LASH) said she has not been vaccinated, citing health issues that surfaced not long ago, though she doesn't rule out the possibility of getting the shot someday. On-air, she tells her listeners that she doesn't oppose vaccines. But she has contributed to an aura of mistrust by frequently referring to what she describes as unanswered questions about possible side effects (menstrual cycle problems, heart inflammation), most of which have been dismissed by leading health experts as exceedingly rare or unproven. Vaccine advocates have blamed misinformation, especially in right-wing media, for the lower vaccination rates in red states.

All the while, she's leavening the mood by sprinkling anecdotes about family life, pop culture references, silly news briefs and updates about the latest medical woes of her pets. She is a voracious researcher, but her on-air delivery feels spontaneous, at times meandering, more a conversation than a stilted monologue.

"She has something different," says Catherine Allen, a survivor of the 2018 Parkland, Fla., school massacre who once appeared at a televised town hall with Loesch. "She is pretty. She is well spoken, she's somebody who you want to listen to. I didn't like what she was saying. But you couldn't help but pay attention to her."

And it's just that sort of appeal, a knack for making it impossible for audiences to look away, that makes Allen think Loesch is a "dangerous" foe.

She is hard-wired to offend - not to apologize. Over the years she has applauded the U.S. Marines who were caught on video urinating on the corpses of Taliban fighters. "I'd drop trou and do it too," she said. And she laid into Chelsea Manning, the former soldier imprisoned for disclosing hundreds of thousands of documents to WikiLeaks, after Manning received hormone treatment and underwent surgery to transition from male to female. Loesch said that just because Manning "put some red lipstick on, poorly applied, and a very poor smoky eye bad dye job, that don't make you a chick. So don't appropriate my sex."

"There's no line Dana Loesch won't cross," Shannon Watts, founder of a group that advocates for legislation to reduce gun violence known colloquially as Moms Demand Action. Loesch, for her part, has said the name of Watts's group sounds like a "porno" title.

In the nation's balkanized media landscape, many Americans on the left had never heard of Loesch until a tumultuous stint as spokeswoman for the National Rifle Association, a period when she appeared in dystopian videos warning of apocalyptic protests and gun-snatching politicians. (She left that role in 2019, when there was a split between the NRA and the advertising firm that employed her to work with the gun rights organization.) Some in the media who were mentioned by name considered the videos threatening, though Loesch shot back on social media that they were misinterpreting promos about a show on media bias.

While so many blue staters hadn't been paying attention, Loesch had been developing, over the course of the past seven years, into a powerhouse conservative influencer. She is, by far, the highest-ranked woman in a field that has been dominated by older White men whose audiences are inexorably dying off.

"I'm able to talk about issues in ways that men can't," Loesch says one evening in a home office decorated with framed cover shots of her in Guns & Ammo magazine and another of her saluting from the cover of a St. Louis weekly in colonial-era garb above the headline "Patriot Dame."

Rush Limbaugh's death created an opportunity and a test for Loesch. Since then, her footprint expanded significantly when she was picked up by the radio and streaming giant Audacy. The deal, which signaled a major bet that she could become an even bigger force nationally, meant she would replace Limbaugh's show in multiple important markets. She is being introduced to listeners who might know her only as a Second Amendment crusader, rather than the host who has been delving into myriad topics for years.

She's taking on newcomers, such as former U.S. Secret Service agent Dan Bongino, a social media juggernaut and entrepreneur who says he's airing on 300 stations. Buck Sexton and Clay Travis, a duo signed by Limbaugh's former syndicator, recently launched a program that airs on 400 stations. The others boast more stations and more listeners, but the question is whether they can hold them. Loesch has the built-in asset of a longtime audience and a record of high ratings.

"Her star is rising," Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers, said in an interview. "Dana Loesch has a great opportunity to raise her profile."

- - -

It begins for Dana Loesch in the Missouri Ozarks - a speck of a place called Hematite with a restaurant she says was actually named "the Rest'urnt."

Her memories are populated by "liquoriffic aunts" and an "Uncle Junior" who favored brown polyester leisure suits, aviator glasses and a gold pinkie ring and whose real name was a mystery to all. For "a spell," she writes in her book, "Flyover Nation," the phone directory didn't trifle with some people's full names, simply listing them with nicknames like "Clunker," "Boots" and "Speedy."

No Dana Loesch origin story would be complete without a shotgun-wielding grandpa. Hers lived in a "bolthole in the Ozarks," ate raccoons and squirrels, and taught her to shoot.

Loesch's parents split up when she was young, and she's been estranged from her father, Paul Eaton, for many years now. (Their relationship is so contentious that Eaton once called a radio station where she worked threatening to sue because he claimed she was lying about him. She says he has trolled her on social media. "Dana's a mean person," Eaton said in an interview. "She's coldblooded.")

Emotionally scarred by her troubled home life, Loesch came to "hate" men.

"I didn't trust the lot of them," she said in an interview.

She moved with her mother, who was in search of decent-paying work, to a scruffy neighborhood in St. Louis. One night, while she was doing a favor for a friend by selling merchandise for an industrial-electronic rock band at a club in St. Louis, she met her future husband, a heavy metal musician himself.

She was 21 when she got pregnant and dropped out of college, and she never got a degree. (She also studied classical ballet for years.) Loesch was four months along and showing a baby bump when she and Chris Loesch married.

"I was having the dress taken out the night before the wedding," Loesch recalled in the interview. Her maternal grandmother arrived for the ceremony and cracked: "So it is white."

In those days, Loesch was far from the conservative firebrand she's become. Like her family, she was a Democrat.

She began what she calls "a conversion" to the conservative movement, a process that was sealed by her reaction to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when she decided that conservatives would do a better job fending off terrorists. Joining the Republican Party alienated her from many in her extended family - a rift that still hasn't healed. But her political evolution also left her with a conundrum: "Who are the cool Republicans?" she asked herself. "I don't know any cool Republicans."

- - -

There's a through-line to Dana Loesch: She's excellent at making people mad, whether organically (her fans' take) or purposefully (her detractors' take).

As a young mother, she wrote a blog called "Mamalogues," then a St. Louis newspaper column. She revealed she was a gun owner and kept weapons in the home where she lived with her young children. She became, "quelle horreur," controversial, she writes in one of her books. Her column ended in a very public breakup.

She became a local tea party leader but broke with the group over candidate choices. "I pushed on - out of anger, out of spite, out of pure punk rock defiance," she wrote in one of her books.

It was a battle she took to the airwaves, where she earned a loyal following on a St. Louis radio station. It was there that she caught the attention of a prominent national radio consultant, David G. Hall, who had been looking for a voice that would appeal to a younger audience and more women.

Within 20 minutes of listening to her show for the first time in 2014, Hall thought, "Oh, my God, she's funny - I could get her on a lot of radio stations - like this afternoon," Hall recalled in an interview. Radio America, an Arlington, Va.-based syndicator, agreed and eventually took her national.

It didn't take long for Hall's instincts to be affirmed. WIBC, a station in Indianapolis, did something that seemed not only crazy, but suicidal: It replaced Rush Limbaugh with Loesch's show, allowing talk radio's most-listened-to program to migrate to a competing station. And they told listeners to Loesch's show where they could find Limbaugh on the dial.

Limbaugh was still the undisputed king of talk radio nationwide. But in Indianapolis, Loesch crushed him in the ratings, Hall said.

She'd arrived.

- - -

Maybe it was Las Vegas (60 dead). Or Orlando, Fla. (49). Or Sutherland Springs, Texas (26).

They blur together now forLawrence Jones when he thinks back to his days as a reporter at the Blaze TV, the Texas-based network that lured Loesch away from her home state to host a program from 2014 to 2017. In the makeup room, Jones and Loesch were usually joking around. But not on those days. Those days when grieving mothers were on the screen.

"You see her go into this isolation," said Jones, whose career had been given a jump-start when Loesch amplified a viral video he'd made about alleged Obamacare fraud.

"Are you good?" he'd ask Loesch on those days. She always answered, "Yes."

"She does not want to show any kind of weakness," Jones said.

Loesch is also ready with arguments she has down pat: The "Tragedy Caucus" wants to take your guns, mass shootings are often the result of federal law enforcement negligence in spotting warning signs, regular people need weapons to protect themselves from criminals, recidivism is a root cause of gun violence. She's told her audience that Kyle Rittenhouse, a teen who will go on trial in November for shooting two demonstrators at violent protests in Kenosha, Wis., following the police shooting of a Black man, is innocent.

Even before becoming spokeswoman for the NRA, a post she held while simultaneously hosting her radio program, Loesch had cemented her position as one of the country's most visible gun rights advocates. In 2014, she wrote a bestseller, "Hands Off My Gun: Defeating the Plot to Disarm America." On the cover, she stands in profile in a tightfitting red dress. She laughs when asked about the pose.

"I mean, I'm not wearing a potato sack" - nor, she said, is she "dressed as a harlot."

What was important to her wasn't the dress, Loesch said, but her insistence that she be pictured with an AR-15, the weapon she calls "the most misunderstood gun in America."

When her friend Roger Stone, the political trickster, was arrested in January 2019 on charges of lying to Congress, Loesch called him to commiserate, and also cracked that she was "disgusted" he had no guns to be confiscated.

She understands the power of branding. Implicit in her website images is the message that she's not only fine with being known as the gun lady, but encourages it.

"I think there are worse things to be thought of," she said.

Then she laughed.

How about being labeled a murderer?

"That doesn't bother me either," she said.

- - -

In fall 2018, a video of Southlake, Texas, public high school students chanting the n-word went viral, prompting a reckoning on race and a proposal to teach critical race theory (CRT), an intellectual movement that examines the way policies and laws perpetuate systemic racism, in the school district.

Loesch, who'd home-schooled her two sons (now 20 and 17) when they were young and later sent them to private schools, was infuriated. But unlike others who opposed the plan, she had a massive national platform - both on her radio show and when she decided to talk about the issue on Fox News.

"Her doing that is what woke people up," said Leigh Wambsganss, an organizer of a CRT opposition group.

What had been a mostly regional controversy exploded nationally. Loesch met with members of the opposition group and advised them how to nail their talking points and avoid trigger words that angered liberals in media interviews, Wambsganss said. Months later, a slate of school board candidates opposed to the curriculum plan was elected to the school board.

If it wasn't clear before, it was crystal clear then.

Dana Loesch has juice.

Her confrontational on-air and online persona can sometimes feel slightly out of step with the charmer Loesch can be in person. In the interview, she said that she hasn't gotten into a physical fight since her schoolyard days and that she's never drawn her gun in self-defense.

But in one NRA video she dripped disdain as images of fiery demonstrations scrolled behind her, intoning ominously, "they use their media to assassinate real news. . . . The only way we save our country and our freedom is to fight this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth."

Loesch's penchant for provocation has made her controversial even within guns rights groups. Some NRA board members were critical when she used an image of cartoon trains in Ku Klux Klan hoods and robes in an NRATV segment deriding the producers of the "Thomas & Friends" children's program for announcing plans to increase the show's diversity by including a train with a non-White face. Loesch said she was making a point that the characters had gray faces, so it seemed unnecessary to her to make the proposed change.

More recently, on her radio program she has been critical of the National Football League for plans to play a song often referred to as the "Black national anthem."

"Does everybody get their own national anthem?" she said. "Do the Irish people here - do they get a national anthem? What about American Indians? Do they get an anthem? What about Hispanics?"

In case anyone misses her point, one of her intro catchphrases says it all: "Shooting down woke culture one crazy headline at a time. It's 'The Dana Show'!"

- - -

During the dankest days of the pandemic lockdowns, Dana Loesch needed something to occupy herself. She took up crocheting. She became a Japanese anime obsessive. She smoked a tobacco pipe because "it smells like nostalgia."

Theirs is a family of high and low tastes. They stash fine wines in a cubby with a door salvaged from an ancient wooden ship, a locale that also has served as a crouching refuge during Texas tornado warnings. They're regulars at a pricey Italian restaurant where the sommelier knows exactly which red is their favorite. But they're also devotees of Taco Bell. Burrito Supremes are her go-to.

There's always something to rile her. She criticized the use of violence in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, saying it should never be a first option in settling national disputes. But she envisioned a time when all options could be exhausted and it might be appropriate.

"If God forbid I am ever called upon or prevailed upon to use my training and open my liberty vault and engage, there is no going back," Loesch said the day after the Capitol attack. "It's a choice pursued until the end with no mercy and no quarter and no foolishness suffered."

Loesch was slow to come around on President Donald Trump, delivering scathing criticism of him, and first supported Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. Big-name conservatives, such as Bongino, have been unabashed about their support for Trump running in 2024.

Loesch is not so sure.

"I want to see how things shape up," she said.

She said she'd support Trump if he were the nominee, but she reserved her most glowing remarks for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, R, who has become a hero to some conservatives for opposing mask mandates - even as the delta variant has caused a spike in coronavirus hospitalizations and deaths.

Before he became president, Loesch introduced Trump at CPAC, the annual gathering of right-wingers. They shook hands.

As she was about to walk away, she paused and asked Trump if he wanted some of her hand sanitizer.

"I thought you'd never ask," he told her.

They had bonded over their shared germaphobia.

Before the pandemic, Loesch was so worried about catching colds that would sap her voice that she would wear masks on airplanes. Now the government is telling her she should mask up to stop the spread of the virus.

She doesn't want to do it.

MENDOTA, Calif. - This small town in California's agriculture-rich Central Valley advertises itself as the "Cantaloupe Center of the World." But as relentless drought punishes California and the West, the land is drying up and the cantaloupes are disappearing.

Farmers have let large portions of their melon fields lie fallow as they struggle to get by on dramatically curtailed water supplies. Some are giving their vines barely enough water to stay alive in an effort to conserve. In other cases, fields that have already been planted will never get harvested because there's not enough water for the fruit to survive.

"We could have fields that could burn up because of lack of water," said Joe Del Bosque, who grows organic melons on a 2,000-acre farm near here and sells to high-end grocers like Whole Foods and Trader Joe's. Del Bosque has cut back his melon crop by 20% this year.

"Melons are very moisture-sensitive and when they need water they will decline very quickly," he said. "They basically shrivel up and die."

Climate change and a devastating heat wave have decimated towns like Mendota this summer, and the carnage stretches far beyond fruit. Farmworkers are struggling to find employment, working fewer hours or driving long distances for jobs. Fewer workers means less spending in the community. Less money for farm suppliers, restaurants, and the small shops where people wire money to family members in Mexico and Central America. Without the water everyone needs to survive, a sense of anxiety pervades about what the future will bring.

"There's very little work," said Teofrido Fraga, 65, a longtime farmworker who used an old straw cowboy hat to shield himself from the baking afternoon sun at an auto repair shop operated by Mendota's mayor, Rolando Castro.

Fraga, a native of Michoacan, Mexico, said that he has labored in the local fields for more than 40 years, but it's getting harder to find work even as he himself slows down. Still, "while I can move, I say I have to work," Fraga said in Spanish.

At a small grocery and wire transfer store nearby, Hortencia Aceves, 52, said that sending money back home is an obligation for local residents, not a luxury they can do without. "People have to send money to their loved ones - they have to eat," said Aceves. "So maybe instead of $100 it's $80."

Population growth has slowed in Mendota, a onetime boom town thrumming with life and surrounded by lush green fields. Dusty streets give way to parched brown tracts, and agriculture packing plants sit empty and padlocked on barren lots. Mayor Castro predicted that without more water, Mendota and other nearby rural communities will turn into "ghost towns" within the next five years.

"We need people here. I don't want to be a ghost town," Castro said. "If there's no water, where are they gonna work?"

Versions of Mendota's story are playing out all over California and the West as the region parches and sizzles under nearly unprecedented drought and heat. Farmers are bulldozing down citrus groves and grinding up the trees because they can't water them, walking away from acres of farmland, selling off herds of cattle, and abandoning annual crops like tomatoes and onions to focus on nut trees they've sunk years of money, labor and water into already. It's a menu of bad options that hurts growers and the communities they are part of, while hiking up the prices of food at grocery stores.

"When you have rising temperatures, you've got early snowmelt, you've got low rainfall, you've got wildfires. It is a toxic mix for California agriculture," U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said while visiting a farm near here earlier this month. "And for that matter for all of American agriculture because of the role California plays."

Vilsack said in an interview that the federal government's agriculture aid programs, many designed to address temporary problems, must be re-examined to fit what is emerging as the new normal: droughts, heat waves and wildfires that are much lengthier, fiercer and more routine than in the past.

"I think we as policymakers need to understand that this is the new reality that we're facing," Vilsack said. "Are the programs we have appropriate, and if not, how do we change them?"

Ninety-five percent of California - which grows around two-thirds of the country's fruits and nuts, including some 75% of U.S. cantaloupes - is now categorized as being in "severe drought" or higher, according to the National Drought Mitigation Center's U.S. Drought Monitor, a partnership between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The percentage of the West in the worst category, "exceptional drought," has never been higher since the monitor began in 2000.

For farmers like Joe Del Bosque, the immediate goal is to somehow make it through this growing season by juggling an array of strategies such as planting fewer crops, pumping unsustainable quantities of groundwater and purchasing water at five times its normal cost from neighbors who have some to spare. But the real concern is what happens if there is not enough snow again this winter to refresh California's water supply, and the drought continues - something meteorologists are already predicting. Many don't know if they'll be able to survive another dry year at all.

"There's a few times where I just want to go and crawl into a hole, I just don't know what to do," said Del Bosque, 72, who started his farm in 1985 and has grown it painstakingly into a profitable enterprise that employs several hundred workers. Del Bosque and his wife have six daughters and hope to hand their farm over to the next generation. Whether that will be possible is now an open question that keeps Del Bosque up at night worrying about where the water will come from, and if there will be enough.

"Everything I've worked for the last 36 years is on the line," Del Bosque said during a break from the grim work of inspecting melon fields that need more water and almond trees that are on the brink.

"This year will do damage, is doing damage, for a lot of the family farms," said Dave Puglia, head of Western Growers, which represents farmers in California, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico. "If the situation does not improve and we have a similar situation next year, we'll lose a large number of family farms and they won't come back because there's no cushion. "

With the bleak realities of climate change now impossible to ignore, Vilsack and others are calling for the West's water stakeholders to come together for new solutions about how to become even more efficient with water, and do more with less. At the large ranch in Helm, Calif., that Vilsack visited this month, owner Don Cameron has worked for years on a complex system of pumps aimed at capturing floodwaters and diverting them into the soil.

This year there is no floodwater to collect. But even as climate change brings tremendous drought, it can also produce the other extremes: raging storms, and winters that have less snow but more rain - precious water that must be captured and put to use.

"I firmly believe we will have floodwater again, because with climate change you experience not only the increased temperatures and the droughts," Cameron said. "The flooding should also be more intense."

A drought emergency was declared for most of the state of California in May, with most farmers receiving none of their usual irrigation water allotment. Because of that, farmers have turned to more expensive groundwater, pumping an additional 6 or 7 million acre-feet of water over usual amounts from their wells this year - an amount that far exceeds what the aquifer can replenish, experts say. Earlier this month, California's State Water Resources Control Board announced it was reducing the amount of water farmers can draw from rivers and streams, further eliminating places for farmers and ranchers to turn.

That decision stirred controversy, some directed at Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is facing a recall election next month, and has urged California residents to conserve water but not imposed any mandates. Central Valley roadways are dotted with "Recall Newsom" signs. The governor's office had no immediate comment on farmers' complaints.

Experts say California will see a drop in agricultural production this year, especially on lower-value crops that farmers may have chosen not to grow in favor of higher-value products like almonds, pistachios and grapes. Some crops, such as leafy greens, may migrate out of the state to places with more hospitable climates.

Although it's difficult to quantify the economic impact of this year's drought while it's underway, Western Growers says that drought conditions between 2014 and 2016 in California resulted in the fallowing of a half-million acres of farmland and losses of $3.8 billion in statewide economic activity. At the same time, the state is contending with other climate change-related disasters. Last year alone, storms and wildfires caused at least $560.5 million in crop damage in the state that went unreimbursed, according to USDA data.

Over the last two decades, three out of four years in California and the American West have been drought years, with a half-century warming trend superimposed on that, said Brad Rippey, a USDA meteorologist at the World Agricultural Outlook Board and one of the authors of the U.S. Drought Monitor. He said the dramatic warming trend is "too much for the system to handle" and that the country is already seeing movement of crops and changes in farming techniques as a result.

""The problem in the West becomes water supply - you can get water from the sky, ground or reservoirs," Rippey said. "When you have drought, you can't get it from the sky; chronic drought and you can't get it from the ground." ."

Back in Mendota, Mayor Castro and other longtime residents of the area remember when the surrounding fields were verdant and the abundance of cantaloupe provided work for anyone who wanted it. In recent years cantaloupe production in California and the United States has slowed, and many cantaloupe sold in the United States are now imported from Central America - a trend this year's drought threatens to accelerate.

As for Mendota's claim to be the "Cantaloupe Center of the World" - a slogan still emblazoned on the municipal crest - Castro acknowledged that "I can't say that anymore."

It started, as so many adventures do, with a nasal swab in the Walgreens drive-through. All four of us sat in the car rotating a giant swab about one inch deep into our nostrils with various grimaces as cars backed up behind us. We put them into our individual test tubes and hoped for the best. That negative result would allow us to get on a plane to Portugal.

It was the first step of a trip that, even the week before we left, I didn't think was going to happen. Besides airport strikes and weekend lockdowns in Lisbon, there was a new delta variant circulating around the globe. Yet with coronavirus test kits for the return trip, hotels and Airbnbs booked, and someone lined up to watch our dog, it seemed as if we were going. Writing this now from the safety of my own desk, I'm still amazed we managed to take two kids across the world in the middle of a travel summer fraught with restrictions and curfews. I'm honestly kind of surprised we went. We have been the ultimately masked family, the first people on board to get vaccinated, the ones who weren't going to let their kids go to physical school in 2020 because of a schools superintendent who wanted everything open as usual. (At the 11th hour, hybrid opened up, and one kid grabbed that option; the other did distance learning all year.)

But I kept all my fears and lip biting to myself. My husband is a physician assistant and needed this trip after a punishing year and a half of being on the front lines in an understaffed emergency room. Travel is our elation machine, our healer. This trip was his reward for risking his life, for the phone calls we made in 2020 ensuring that, if our kids were orphaned, everything was lined up for them to be instantly connected with family in other states. Was the trip risky? Possibly. But all of us were vaccinated, with the exception of our youngest, who was not yet eligible, and we knew we would always comply with safety measures.

After the Walgreens test cleared us to fly, my husband spent three hours on the phone the night before our flight to ensure the testing had taken place during the narrow time frame required. This was tricky, given that the first leg of the trip from California was 12 hours and involved a nine-hour time-zone jump forward. That means we "lost" 21 hours just in flying, when the test needed to be performed - with a 48-hour turnaround time for results - within 72 hours of both our initial flight and the second flight out of Munich. Mathematically speaking, that meant there was a scant three hours of acceptable timing for us to have taken the test.

Sure enough, in San Francisco, the airline employee at check-in believed the test had not been performed within the proper time frame. We deteriorated into low-grade panic, and I even started contemplating alternative destinations as we waited in the cavernous international departures hall. Finally, the employee was able to okay us for travel. Hurdle jumped! But we still had to fill out multiple forms on our phones for each passenger. (This particular trip during this particular pandemic would not be possible without smartphones and good WiFi. Luddites, you have to stick to car trips.)

Once on the plane, I had to be satisfied thinking about the impressive air filtration system I had read about and the fact that I would been given a wet wipe to clean my tray table and armrests. Everyone was masked. We were told by announcement that, when food arrived, we were to remove our masks to take a bite but put them back on to chew. I'd seen kids do this in my backyard when I hosted a summer writing camp and was stunned to realize that this was what they must have been doing all year at school. But on the plane, folks just took off their masks altogether to eat, ignoring the protocol. We were served multiple times on this first leg: two snacks and a full meal, plus two more drink rounds.

At our layover in Munich, all 150 passengers stood in a single line to again verify our coronavirus status. This was the case throughout all legs of the trip. (On the return, we came through Zurich.) Each time was one more opportunity for there to be a problem and for us to be denied entry.

Once we made it to Lisbon, we found a city of effortless masking. Everyone wore masks everywhere. In open air and walking down the street, catching a ferry, riding the metro, shopping in the grocery store: All were masked . . . and not with their noses sticking out like snouty scofflaws.

Ride shares and taxis are not permitted to take more than three people. When you're a family of four, that's a problem. One day, we took a taxi to a historical site that isn't easily reached by public transportation; the two drivers who had been chatting to each other as we walked up to the queue informed us that we had to take two taxis . . . and then the whole time, they talked to each other on their phones and drove us hither and snakily yon while driving up the tab. Ah, well; at least the view out the window was pretty. Another time, a taxi driver pulled out a third row, which satisfied requirements but seemed silly, because we still shared the same interior square footage of the vehicle.

As days went by, I started to relax into our journey and saw that, if anything, Portugal was safer than our little corner of the United States.

For instance, at our Airbnb in Lisbon, a document posted prominently on the wall contained a hand-drawn map of the apartment with one bedroom marked in all caps, "ZONA DE CONTENÇAO," which had me madly consulting Google Translate to see whether someone had the coronavirus while staying in that "zone." The document turned out to be a pretty cool thing, a contingency plan in case a guest did contract the coronavirus while there. If so, the visitor would quarantine in that particular bedroom. I appreciated that our host was thinking ahead; I don't know whether he was required to create this paperwork.

At the fabulous Bussaco Palace Hotel, once an actual palace for Portuguese royalty and now a UNESCO World Heritage site, we had to take a coronavirus test upon arrival. We were quickly ushered into a small conference room where we self-administered our tests, and an employee returned to see our results. We had brought our own tests (as well as the more official ones for the return flight), but if we hadn't had them on us, the hotel was charging only 3 euros, or about $3.50. The hotel we stayed at in Porto did not require this.

Except for the airlines and the first Airbnb, we were never asked to show proof of our vaccination status. (In some European cities, such as Paris, Americans must obtain a digital health pass that proves one's full vaccination to be able to enter locations such as restaurants and museums.)

This trip did fortify our souls and restore some balance. Portugal is full of extraordinary sights; the tilework facades alone are worth a trip, not to mention climbing the ruins of a medieval Moorish castle through a thick mist and trying new foods and drinks, such as Port wine, named for the city of Porto, and the nation's distinctive ginjinha liqueur. We also visited a secretive Baroque library that you cannot photograph and a neo-Gothic bookstore that is said to have inspired J.K. Rowling in crafting the world of Harry Potter. All the while, we tried hard to have mixed-language conversations with some of the nicest people we've ever met in our years of traveling.

After two weeks, we were reluctant to come home and swap the challenges of traveling for the challenges of daily life. If not for our dog, maybe we would have tried to make the getaway permanent.

But we had one last coronavirus-related task to get through to go home . . . and it turned out to be a doozy. My husband had purchased special coronavirus tests acceptable for the airline, which required us to go online with a medical representative who would watch us take a bar-coded test through the computer's camera after verifying our identity with our passports. This test ($180 for a six-pack) had been vaunted online as taking only 15 minutes. However, the reality was that each of us waited an hour or more for a representative to come online, then another 15 minutes for a separate rep to read the test results. That meant that our last evening in Porto was spent hanging out in the apartment for roughly five hours, hearing the same scripted instructions over and over and waiting anxiously for the line to go live. (Just to make things fun, the calls dropped a few times after 20 minutes.)

Budget travelers will be happy to hear we again flew economy light and used our flight-approved carry-on backpacks. We did end up paying $25 per ticket to select seating at the last minute for the first leg. Portugal's a very affordable country; a tuna sandwich called atum or a steak sandwich called a prego costs only 2 or 3 euros. And the palace we stayed in cost about half what you would pay in your typical Best Western. Besides the happy financials, Portugal was dramatically uncrowded in this pandemic summer. We took many photographs with no other people in them, and we didn't encounter any other Americans.

Seemingly moments after our arrival home, the kids embarked on their first day of school, and summer became, as is always the case in childhood, fleeting. I'm glad we held fear at bay and took this trip. When I see my tired husband don his scrubs again and take his own journey back to the ER, I'm glad he put himself first for once.

- - -

IF YOU GO

-Where to stay

Bussaco Palace Hotel

Mata do Bussaco, Luso

011-351-231-937-970

almeidahotels.pt

Striking architecture, UNESCO World Heritage grounds in a national forest and a deep sense of history endow this hotel with fairy-tale charm. It's perfect for hikers or for those who want to nurse a cocktail in the beautiful common rooms. Rooms range from about $137 to $839 per night.

- Where to eat

Tasquinha Ginja d'Alfama

12 Rua de São Pedro -Alfama, Lisbon

011-351-936-207-958

facebook.com/ginjadalfama

This hole-in-the-wall restaurant, which is part of the usual tourist path through the Alfama neighborhood, offers housemade ginjinha, the famous Portuguese cherry liqueur, and inexpensive sandwiches. Open Wednesday to Monday 10 a.m. to 11:45 p.m.; closed Tuesday. A glass of ginjinha is about $1, food from about $2 to $7.