February 28
Our fist couple of days have been filled with challenges, the last of which is the blog. Not only will pictures not upload but the text isn’t showing up on the screen either. So, we’re writing it in Word, then copying/pasting into the site.
Anyhoo….
The trip was uneventful but long. We had a 7½ hour flight to London, then changed planes for Lisbon. We had a bit of a crisis before boarding our Air Portugal flight because the gate agent didn’t have a return flight in her computer. We explained that we were flying back from Stockholm on 5/26 but because it wasn’t showing up in her computer, she wasn’t going to let us board. Of course, Lynn couldn’t find the confirmation email in her phone so she had to connect her laptop to the airport WiFi and, luckily, found it there. This has never happened before. Even in 2016 when we didn’t have a return flight at all because we took the cruise back to the States, it wasn’t a problem. We have two additional flights (Lisbon to Paris; Paris to Copenhagen) but now Lynn has a picture of the return reservation on her phone so there shouldn’t be any further difficulties.
The flight to Lisbon went smoothly as did getting through immigrations and customs. We grabbed a cab to our AirBnB flat but didn’t hang around long before heading out for some sightseeing. By this time we’d been awake over 24 hours and knew if we sat around too long we’d fall asleep. Our host, Luis, suggested taking the red tourist tram which makes a short loop around the city and takes about 90 minutes. It’s a hop on/hop off but we stayed on the tram, making note of the places we wanted to visit today. Of course, Lynn dozed off a couple of times but she still saw most of the sites.
Lisbon has about 264 days of sunshine a year, unfortunately yesterday wasn’t one of them. When we got off the tram it was raining pretty hard and we’d left our umbrellas at the flat. So, by the time we got home, we were pretty soaked. The evening was quiet…. dinner, watching the Rick Steves’ Lisbon episodes on YouTube and planning our stops for today. We actually managed to stay awake until 10pm before finally getting to bed, a mere 40 hours after waking up Monday morning.
After a great night’s sleep, a delicious breakfast, and 10 minutes of frantically searching for the house keys, we headed back out to the tram. Even though the tram is supposed to be on a 30-minute schedule, we waited about 50 minutes before it finally arrived. We rode for about 20 minutes before getting off at the Praca de Commercio, which is one of the main city squares. It’s right on the marina but since it was another cloudy, rainy day (had umbrellas today; but much too windy to use them) the view wasn’t that great. There’s a 1.5-mile-long bridge that looks very much like the Golden Gate Bridge and it turns out that both bridges were designed by the same company. We didn’t get a real clear view of it due to the weather but maybe the weather will clear before we leave so we can get a better picture.
After stopping at Tourist Information to arrange our upcoming day trips, we strolled the walking street. We weren’t very interested in the shops, but it was nice to walk, especially since the rain had stopped. We had a delicious pizza for lunch then headed back to the red tram. We got off in the famed Alfama district which is one of the few neighborhoods left standing after the 1755 earthquake that killed 30,000 people and destroyed the rest of the city. It’s filled with shops, restaurants and crisscrossing streets. We climbed up the hill (Lisbon isn’t called the City of Seven Hills for nothing; these suckers are steep, too) to the Castle of St. George where, miraculously, the sun actually came out! The Castle was built by the Moors in the 11th century and is still in remarkable condition, at least the exterior walls. There’s nothing left of the inside, but it was very nice to stroll around the grounds. Once leaving, though, we ran into our biggest challenge. Long story short, we got separated when Lynn ran into a shop for a couple of minutes. Apparently, Peter didn’t hear her say where she was going and when he looked up, she was gone. When she left the shop just a few minutes (seriously, no more than 3 minutes tops) she couldn’t find him anywhere. The worst part was, that they had no way to contact each other. In spite of 4 phone calls to Verizon before we left, Lynn’s phone wasn’t working so we had no way to reconnect. Peter said he waited for her at the top of the hill for 30 minutes but since she was at the top of the hill waiting for him, we must have been on different hills. Finally, a police officer let Lynn use his phone and found out that Peter had gone back down to the tram thinking she might be there…. she wasn’t. So, she headed down the hill to meet him at the tram but took a wrong turn somewhere and got lost in the Alfama. After about 30 minutes of climbing up and down hills looking for the tram stop, she found a tourist information office. Turns out, not only did she walk too far down the hill, but she also turned in the wrong direction when she finally found the tram tracks. In order to get to stop 5, she would have had to walk up yet one more gigantic hill. The office let her use the phone to call Peter and this time we decided to just meet at home. What an ordeal!!! The first thing Lynn did when she walked into the flat was to connect via internet with a Verizon Customer Service rep to troubleshoot her phone. After about 30 minutes, it was finally fixed. And we know it works because she just got a spam robocall from New Jersey. Hopefully this won’t happen again but if it does, at least we’ll be able to reach each other.
So, the first couple days of our adventure haven’t exactly gone smoothly but we’re still enjoying Lisbon. Tomorrow we’re going strike out for Sintra and Cascais, both of which are highly recommended. Sintra is about a 40-minute train ride from Lisbon and after site seeing there, we’ll take a bus to Cascais. We could take a tour but decided to go it alone. Hopefully we’ll have fewer challenges than we did today.
Guess that’s it for now. Have a great night everyone. We’ll post pictures as soon as we can.
Ready to go; just waiting for car to pick us up. Notice the small suitcases. We learned a lot on our last European Adventure so this time we packed super light. We’ll need to do laundry every 5-6 days, but the euro washers don’t hold much more anyway so we should be good.