All's Well That Ends Well

All’s Well That Ends Well

They say that Lisbon is built on seven hills and I climbed all eight!  My calves have never spoken to me in such harsh language. Each morning I would get up and take baby steps to get them moving again.  It was, however, a small price to pay for a marvelous time in Lisbon.

We played tourist for two full days, hopping on and off the tourist buses that take you all over the city as well as to the far out tourist towns on the coast. Lisbon is extremely beautiful, well laid out, boasts wide avenues, and has architecture that ranges from colonial to Art Deco to Post Modern.  There are parks everywhere and I’m not talking about little pocket parks; these are acres and acres of well designed parks filled with zoos, birds of all types from peacocks to parakeets, and large and small water features that provide a sense of tranquility I seldom find in large cities.

We spent one or our days traveling out to Cascais, a lovely little seaside town that is filled with all manner of shops and restaurants.  The open-top bus took us right past the famed Praia do Guincho beach, where all James Bond fans will remember that James saved the lovely Diana Rigg in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.” It was a most exciting day and the weather was just perfect for sitting atop a bus and marveling at all the beauty of the Lisbon coast.

We had a wide variety of dining experiences, some of them rather elegant and others down and dirty. On one of the down and dirty nights, we were sipping our wine in a very small restaurant when all of a sudden six men started to play various stringed instruments while another started to shout out Portuguese poetry. This was not Fado, but rather folk music, and all of the other guests knew all of the words and sang along on the songs that didn’t have a poetry component. It was a ball and such a very, very unexpected surprise - which Lisbon seems to excel in providing.

After four exciting days, it was time to head home and we winged our way from Lisbon to Frankfurt where we spent the night before continuing on to Dulles.  Our flights were all very comfortable and relaxing, something that doesn’t happen often in air travel these days.  We were just beginning our decent into Dulles when the captain came on to tell us that due to heavy storms around Dulles they were diverting us to Philadelphia - and with apologies to WC Fields, we didn’t want to be going there.  The plane changed course and we were not very happy about the prospects of long delays, but the travel gods were with us and we abruptly changed course again as the captain announced that they were opening Dulles again for awhile and we could land as planned, albeit forty minutes late. Whew.

Ours was the last luggage to come off the big 747, most likely because we had checked it though from Lisbon and it was the first to be loaded. It took an hour to get the bags and then another ninety minutes to get home since we hit peak rush hour, but home we are and happy to be here.  Best wishes, Cindy and Wm