In October 2022, Tom Threinen suggested to his wife, Terry Williams, that they spend their annual New Year’s anniversary trip somewhere neither had ever been — the Azores islands.
“Sounds great, and by the way where are these islands?” Williams asked.
“There are nine of them,” said Threinen, a lifelong surfer. “There’s lots of surfing everywhere!”
They landed on São Miguel Island — about 900 miles west of mainland Portugal — on Dec. 29, 2022. A few days later, they made an offer on a house.
“It really was love at first sight. We just knew,” said Williams, as I talked with the couple on Zoom. “It’s impossible to describe the attraction this island has for us. I’m aways ranting on about the magic here, the lovely sights, the lovelier people, the cows.”
Today, Williams, 78, and Threinen, 76, live in a roughly 200-year-old village house in Ribeira Grande, a town on São Miguel’s north coast, a four-minute walk from one of Europe’s most famous surfing beaches. It is the dream next chapter for this couple. They live in the parish of Matriz, home to about 4,000 residents.
“We couldn’t have afforded this lifestyle in San Diego,” said Williams.
Williams moved to San Diego at the age of 2 when the Navy transferred her father. After graduating from San Diego State with a degree in Spanish, she called San Diego Magazine every week for nearly a year until they hired her — the start of a decade in the business side of publishing. She then spent 20 years as vice president, producer and writer for a San Diego video and film production house, working for dozens of local businesses, including every major museum in Balboa Park, and collecting four Emmy Awards along the way.
At 55, she “retired” into what she thought would be an easygoing part-time job managing the San Diego Press Club — and stayed 20 years as executive director, growing membership to about 400 and building the Excellence in Journalism Awards. She retired in October 2023, the club’s 50th anniversary year.
Threinen, a 1974 San Diego State fine arts graduate, was advertising art director and staff artist at Surfing Magazine. The two met in 1980 through the magazine world and drifted apart when Threinen left to pursue an MBA at New York University’s Stern School of Business and a career in commercial real estate development with his father in Las Vegas. They reconnected by email in 2000 after 20 years, and they got married in January 2006 — a third marriage for each.
Every November since, they have held a two-person retreat to review the past year and set goals for the year ahead. The year before Williams’ retirement, the question on the table was: What next? “At the conclusion of a huge discussion that took a couple of days, we knew we would have one last adventure,” she says. That adventure, even though they didn’t know it then, turned out to be moving to the Azores.
The adventure came with bureaucracy. Their D7 residency visa required proof of passive income, private health insurance and an FBI background report. Their residency cards arrived in July 2024. The house renovation, which might have taken a year in San Diego, took 2 1/2. In early 2025, they sold their City Heights house.
Their mornings begin with coffee and toast on the deck, gazing over the village rooftops to the ocean. Threinen surfs and paints — seascapes, narrow streets, old buildings, festivals. Williams swims and, characteristically, has taken on a project — converting a circa-1780 building on the plaza by the village church into a gallery for Tom’s work. The effort is currently mired in Portuguese permitting. “It actually looks like I’ll turn 80 before we get the gallery open,” she jokes.
Meanwhile, the town’s art museum director liked Threinen’s paintings — her village seen through a newcomer’s eyes — and she offered him a show that opens Oct. 9.
Their social calendar is busy, and they are not bored. They go to festivals and concerts, have dinner with friends, and Williams is a member of an international women’s group that sponsors a monthly lunch to benefit a local cause.
Challenges exist. The local dialect, Terry says, is “as Portuguese as Cajun is English.” The electrician doesn’t arrive and doesn’t call. A cultural-and-language gap at the new hospital led them to hire a medical concierge service to book appointments and translate options. The hardest part is distance: three grandchildren, five great-grandchildren and the roughly 18-hour journey to San Diego.
Do they miss San Diego? “Yes, lots of it,” Williams admits — “our friends especially, the La Jolla Playhouse, the Rady Shell, every square inch of Balboa Park.” Her advice to would-be Azores retirees: don’t take it lightly. “It’s like getting yet another master’s degree. Gather the facts, seek help, listen to your heart and your guts.” (She recommends a private Facebook group called Americans and Friends in Portugal that provides information about the process of getting a resident permit and moving. You have to answer why you want to join to be accepted.)
She continues, “We made this move almost accidentally, but it has turned out to be incredibly magical. The community here has embraced us in the most heartwarming way. Our neighbors bring us food, encourage our language skills (very difficult), invite us to events, and make sure we don’t miss any festivals or feasts. We cannot get used to it. We travel around marveling that we actually do live here.”
Asked what she likes the most, she says, “That it is entirely up to us.”
Thank you to the readers who emailed me about my 50th reunion Harvard Business School column. Many asked what happened to my Karmann Ghia. A classmate drove it to my aunt’s house in Los Angeles while I went to South America for the summer. In August 1976, I drove it to Sacramento to start my job at the Sacramento Bee. I sold it 18 months later when I got a job with the Los Angeles Times and decided that I needed a car with air conditioning if I was going to drive on the L.A. freeways. I’d love to still have it.
I appreciate your column ideas. Please send them to me at bbry@blackbirdv.com.