Category: Travel Stories

That last of a multi-part series on our three-week June 2024 trip to Portugal (Lisbon and points north)…

The Porto airport is gleaming and quite efficient. Our passports were checked once during luggage check-in, once at an immigration barrier set up on the way to the gates that serve non-EU destinations, and once more at the gate. Except for the final check at the gate, this was all done without a wait on a Friday before a 9:00 am flight (might not have gone as well on a Sunday when the British are returning from their weekend escapes).

The check-in counters still have their Plexiglas coronapanic barriers and, as in Get Smart, humans respond in the predictable way of leaning to one side of it so that they’re able to hear each other:

To my delight, I found a handful of Scientists in the terminal, voluntarily packing themselves into 100-percent full airliners while relying on 3-cent masks to prevent becoming infected with a deadly aerosol virus. Here’s one in University of Virginia Statistics logo wear:

(And he/she/ze/they is wearing a murse?)

Here are a couple more:

The reintegration into a Rainbow-first society begins as soon as a passengers steps onto the United flight. The seatback video screen promotes exactly one class of movies to a passenger who doesn’t touch the screen and search by category:

The Out and Proud collection is all about “modern love”, so the child who views the screen might reasonably infer that a non-LGBTQ+ situation represented “obsolete love”. We landed and were greeted by a “masks mandatory” sign:

After nearly a one-hour wait to clear immigration, it was time for the kids to get a refresher on America’s state religion:

(As noted in a previous post, given that our passports were examined three times prior to departure by qualified Portuguese personnel, why can’t the U.S. just wave in anyone holding up a U.S. passport? That’s how it is done when people disembark a cruise ship in Miami. The U.S. immigration bureaucrats feel comfortable, apparently, relying on Royal Caribbean’s ability to keep track of passengers and their passports.)

We went to a secret restaurant in Newark that is reserved for at least moderately frequent United flyers. I told the kids to go into a public restaurant and tell the staff “We don’t want to eat here. We want to eat somewhere secret.” Everything was going smoothly until they noticed the CNN screen with the word “Trump” continuously displayed (see Do CNN viewers think that Donald Trump is a god? but it also might have been because we landed a day after the first Biden-Trump debate of the 2024 election). The 10-year-old asked me who I thought would win the election. I said that Donald Trump wasn’t my first choice among the Republicans and that it was impossible for me to predict how other Americans might vote, but Biden’s promises of student loan forgiveness and other free stuff was going to be very popular with many voters. (Whenever politics comes up, I remind them that people who situated differently will rationally vote differently and that, for example, their unionized public school teachers are almost certainly going to vote for Biden and they should respect that.) As I hadn’t sufficiently condemned Donald Trump, a couple of elite New Yorkers at a nearby table stepped in to tell the kids that Donald Trump was a convicted felon and that his crimes were too disgusting for them to even hear about (what is the right age for a child to learn about the world’s oldest profession and Donald Trump’s alleged customer status?) and that he was “a racist”. So the kids ended up learning quite a bit about the elite Democrat political faith just while changing planes (even the simplest mask can prevent respiratory virus infection; the Rainbow Flag worship, and the blind rage regarding Donald Trump).

Our Honda Odyssey was waiting for us in the PBI garage (somewhat more expensive than an Uber round-trip, but worth it, I felt, for the shade (our car would otherwise have been on the street or in our driveway)) and, unlike the Sixt rental Mercedes, started right up despite having sat for three weeks.

We got to the house around midnight Portugal time (same as London), but discovered that the upstairs A/C system had shut down. It had been professionally serviced three months earlier, but there was what looked like white jello growing in the condensate drain. I borrowed my engineer neighbor’s Shop Vac with custom PVC connector and managed to clear the clog. The next day… a second air handler shut down with the same issue. I vacuumed out all three lines (significant gunk and water from each) and scheduled an appointment with the professionals… I think what needs to be done in a compressed air/CO2/nitrogen blowout starting at the air handler every 3 months. Plus maybe an IV drip.

Ponte de Lima is on the way back from Santiago de Compostela. It’s notable for being one of the oldest towns in Portugal (the bridge goes back to Roman times, for example) and also for being one of the flattest that I found. If you’re tired of having to walk up and down hills just to go to the supermarket, this might be a worthy base of operations. Here’s what it looks like from across the Roman/Medieval eponymous bridge:

The town is part of the coastal Camino from Porto to Santiago de Compostela:

It looks like one can walk (or maybe also bike?) about 70 km on a trail along the riverbank. I found a sign indicating that the north bank path abeam the town was at km 21 of an “ecovia”:

The town has a lot of the usual good stuff of a Portuguese town, including an attractive main square and what looked like a lot of good restaurants. They were running, across the river, an international garden festival, and there was some sort of celebration (on a Monday afternoon) that required a marching band in town.

Speaking of town festivals, we arrived in Braga, Portugal’s 7th largest city, for the end of the annual São João de Braga festival. This has been going on for about 900 years, ever since the establishment of a church dedicated to St. John the Baptist.

The town has a famous cathedral, inside which I found some of the statues that had been carried in processions:

Braga’s star attraction is a 15-minute drive from the center: Sanctuary of Bom Jesus do Monte (a UNESCO World Heritage Site). Maybe it is my Jewish heritage, but I can’t figure out why a place would be named for “Good Jesus”. There is no Catholic group that believes in a “Bad Jesus”, right? You’ll want to park at (or Uber to) the top and walk down the stairs, then take the water-counterbalance-driven funicular up.

Side chapels as you walk down the stairs depict events towards the end of Jesus’s life:

There is a beautiful garden above the sanctuary. Just walk uphill.

Braga is nice, but it wasn’t our favorite overnight stop. The pedestrian streets downtown would be great for meeting up with friends and hanging out, but we didn’t have any friends. Braga does have what I think is a private celebration of progressive causes, e.g., Interseccionalidade and Free Palestine:

After two nights in town, we drove out via a beautiful McDonald’s that was absolutely empty for breakfast (possibly just a single lady working). The Portuguese have yet to adopt American breakfast customs, apparently.

We returned out rental Mercedes at Sixt by the Porto airport (mournful saga) and Ubered to downtown. Maybe we’d been spoiled by our time in the Portuguese mountains, but the old town seemed absolutely overrun with tourists. Here’s the train station with its famous tile art:

Would you like to go to a bookstore that inspired J.K. Rowling? Here’s what Livraria Lello looks like inside (Wikipedia):

You’ll need to pay between 8 and 45 euros online, however, and then wait in line for a while before you can begin your shopping process. Here’s what the line looked at around noon on a weekday:

Note that the infamous TERF herself says that she never went to this bookstore, but is someone who denies the miracle of gender transformation a credible source on any subject?

There’s an important church nearby. Here’s the line to get into that one…

Keep in mind that we were there in June and the peak tourist season is July-August. Locals said that the crowds would get much much worse. We found a good escape in the Serralves Foundation, a huge hilly garden (walk down; elevator up) with a contemporary art museum in a residential area. Once you’re there, it is a 30-minute walk or quick Uber ride to the mouth of the Douro River. This is a high quality beach by European standards, though the water is much too rough and/or cold by Florida standards.

We finished our trip with the classic Francesinha dish:

We could have had a second one for breakfast at the airport (well, maybe they don’t serve it all day, despite the name):

We went to the UNESCO World Heritage town of Guimarães on our way back into the mountains.

This place gets hit with bus tours that trek through the duke’s palace, for example. This might be where Hrothgar’s mead hall (Heorot) was!

It’s still very pleasant, though maybe an afternoon here is enough.

We drove up into Portugal’s only national park, Peneda-Gerês, via São Bento da Porta Aberta, an important Christian pilgrimage destination.

We arrived in what barely seemed like a village, Campo do Gerês, and stayed a few nights to walk in the surrounding mountains. The highlight of my trip, of course, was a visit to the town of Covide:

The weirdly narrow “house” is for storing grain safe from animals. Here’s the local cemetery:

It was in Covide that we found walking paths down which Google Maps tried to send us in the Mercedes E class. It was also there that we found a car with a great design for Europe’s ridiculously narrow and nonstandard roads:

The Citroen Cactus has Airbumps that can be sacrificed in the event of a scrape. Both Covide and Campo do Gerês are on the Caminho da Geira e dos Arrieiros, a 239 km route from Braga, Portugal to Santiago de Compostela.

Even if this path coincides with roads for cars, it’s likely hilly everywhere. The 28 km stretch above is particularly worrisome!

Campo do Gerês has a good museum on the Roman history of the area.

We did see some old Roman road sections and also columns in various places nearby.

There is a lot of good hiking and, for those who don’t mind cold water, swimming, around and in the reservoir impounded by the Vilarinho das Furnas Dam.

There is one hotel in Campo do Gerês, which has a good restaurant, and there are quite a few campgrounds and AirBnBs. The unpaved road alongside the reservoir has an excellent surface and is a good way to get to the border with Spain (a derelict unstaffed crossing).

Instead of taking the Google Maps route on blind faith, we asked locals how to get out of the Parque Natural da Serra da Estrela. This took us through Belmonte, which we discovered was home to a Jewish museum and also a church on a traditional route to Santiago de Compostela.

Belmonte has an otter sculpture and a variety of memorials to Pedro Álvares Cabral (1467-1520) who was born in the town and went on to become “the first human in history to ever be on four continents”. He is credited as the European discoverer of Brazil.

The museum is small, but provides a good overview of Judaism and how it was vaguely continued after the Inquisition:

There’s the inevitable castle in this hilltop town and also a church that has been turned into a museum regarding the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela:

I’m surprised that Sixt was so passionate about charging us for a minor scratch. They should celebrate any time that a foreigner returns a diesel-powered car that hasn’t been destroyed via filling it with gasoline. Here’s what the clueless English speaker might see at a pump:

“gasóleo” is diesel and “gasolina” is gasoline. The letter codes are also important. “B7” is diesel, though we were advised not to use the cheaper “simple” version because it can clog injectors over the long run (I paid up for the premium gas to keep Sixt’s cars in top condition and they certainly didn’t act grateful!).

Somehow we got onto the highway without misfueling the already-shaky Mercedes and made it to our next stop: Parque Arqueológico do Vale do Côa, a UNESCO World Heritage site discovered only in the 1990s. Book in advance if you want to do the English-language Jeep tour and see the Stone Age rock carvings in situ. The museum has a good restaurant and a great location, with the opportunity to take stairs all the way down into the deep valley cut by the Douro.

We probably should have figured out some wineries to visit near this museum, some of which looked spectacular from the road, and stayed overnight, but we’d already reserved a hotel in the small town of Amarante, about two hours west.

Amarante has some nice churches and a museum devoted to local hero Amadeo de Souza Cardoso, a painter who might have become the Portuguese Picasso if he hadn’t died at age 30 from the 1918 flu. It was mostly a nice place to relax and enjoy the small town Portugal lifestyle.

The town has a clean hot springs pool facility (call to reserve; they speak English), but is mostly famous for cookies that Bruno would love (these are traditional fertility-related, not modern 2SLGBTQQIA+ symbols):

Here’s the view from our AirBnb (two nights):

Renting a car at the Lisbon airport takes so long that I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone getting off a transatlantic flight. Catch an Uber into Lisbon or Sintra, spend a few nights, and then send one designated victim back to the Lisbon airport to wait in various lines for 1.5 hours (the Sixt folks said that our 1.5-hour wait occurred during a “calm” period and that it could and would get much much worse; a normally polite American grandma described her experience at Hertz on a different day as a “sh*tshow”). After the car is obtained, have the rest of the family or group Uber out to the airport (only about 15 minutes from downtown Lisbon) to meet the designated victim. Some folks waiting in the line to get paperwork and then the line for people who successfully obtained paperwork:

Try to avoid being given a plug-in hybrid. These are impossible to charge in Portugal unless you apply for an EDP account, which is impractical unless you have a Portuguese fiscal number (like our Social Security number), a European bank account with IBAN, a Portuguese phone number, and a few days to wait for various hurdles to be cleared. I never saw a charging station that accepted credit cards. Our plug-in hybrid Mercedes had almost no trunk space due to the big battery that we had no way to charge. It was dragged out from an obscure corner of the garage so covered with dust and dirt that it wasn’t safe to drive (the employees cleaned the windows for us before we left). To add insult to injury, the car failed within 48 hours and then Sixt charged us 61 euros for the tow truck that had to come out (we didn’t buy “roadside assistance” for their defective cars). A little more abuse after we got back to the U.S… Sixt charge us 395 euros for a purported scratch to a wheel (or maybe just a plastic wheel cover; we never figured that out), which included fees for “loss of use” (they already said that the car needed to go to a dealer for battery/computer repairs) and “damage handling fee”. I don’t remember ever scraping a curb (Portuguese curbs are, in general, low and rounded) so I think the root cause of this debacle might be that the car was delivered so dirty it wasn’t possible to see a minor pre-existing scratch.

The car-based portion of our trip began at the Mafra palace, which has its own basilica:

Being royal meant doing a lot of shooting:

It was also possible to read:

They also had a pre-flippers pinball machine and what seems like a precursor to foosball:

Here’s lunch at a restaurant a few steps from the palace:

Next stop was the Buddha Eden garden, previously described, and then Nazaré, Europe’s capital for big wave surfing in the winter. Here’s a view from Sitio de Nazaré, which overlooks the beach and has a nice church and square;

Then it was on to Batalha, home to a UNESCO World Heritage church and monastery. A Portuguese travel agent discouraged us from staying here, but it turned out to be a great base for two nights. We were surprised to learn that the monastery contains Portugal’s tomb of the unknown soldier (the country fought as England’s ally in World War I).

On the way to Grutas de Mira de Aire (limestone caves), we stopped to walk on a Roman road. Note the difference between 1x and 3x on the iPhone (at 1x you can see the Roman wind turbine and the Roman picnic tables):

Fortunately, they’re not afraid to punch up the caves with a bit of color:

On the way back to Batalha, we stopped at Castelo de Porto de Mós:

Then it was back to our AirBnB, which was a tiny but efficient 2BR ($105/night including cleaning):

One thing that we learned is that if you want fast reliable Internet, AirBnB is the best lodging option. The large Portuguese WiFi networks never seemed to be fast or reliable. Free WiFi at the Lisbon airport, for example, never worked at all (two visits a week apart). Hotel Internet was always slower than AirBnB WiFi and also subject to interruptions, dead zones, etc.

The next day, after some tow truck assistance to reset our Mercedes plug-in hybrid’s brain, we drove to Coimbra and Portugal dos Pequenitos, a theme park of miniatures covered in Celebrating Juneteenth here in Portugal. After that, we drove up the hill to the founded-in-1290 university to see the famous library (no photos allowed) and, coincidentally, a lot of graduation celebrations:

Coimbra is a nice town, but the hills make it tough to get around, at least from a Floridian’s perspective.

I’m wondering if it wouldn’t have been smart to stay in Belém, a neighborhood of Lisbon that is rich in tourist attractions. I would recommend that everyone visiting Lisbon start at the commercial immersive Earthquake Museum, a 1.5-hour experience that helps you understand how the various parts of the post-1755 city are arranged. Their motto is “expect the unexpected”, which got the 10-year-old tangled up in mental knots (“If you expect something then how can it be unexpected?”).

We hit the nearby Belém palácio restaurant (excellent basic Portuguese food, including the cuttlefish below) and then the obligatory tourist stop at Pastéis de Belém for pastries that are almost exactly the same as pastel de nata (crunchier crust, perhaps):

It was then time to experience peacocks at the tropical botanical garden:

(The 10-year-old’s standard statement on seeing any peacock: “Dad, buy me a shotgun and then… problem solved.” We actually do have a neighbor who received a 28 gauge shotgun at age 9 and, therefore, is equipped to deal with any problems caused by ornamental peafowl.)

I’m going to cover the powerplant part of MAAT, the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, separately, but here are a few photos of the art part:

Visitors could take off their shoes and enter the installation to pound away on about 30 different drums. This proved extremely popular with some members of our group…

Palm Beach International has an in-terminal art museum. Here’s a work regarding homophobia that is so pervasive and severe that the artwork “to discuss homophobia” was selected for display to several million travelers:

Our 8-year-old was seated next to a New Yorker on the flight to EWR:

Incompetence by United Airlines resulted in the inbound plane arriving at PBI one hour late. That put us right into prime Florida afternoon thunderstorm territory so there was an additional delay while lightning struck all around the airport and the ramp was closed. I bit my nails as the 2.5-hour plane change time in Newark, during which we’d have to take a bus from Terminal A to Terminal C, was eaten away.

Despite the time crunch at EWR, I managed to get a photo of an all-gender family restroom, the last so-labeled that we would likely see for three weeks:

The young, slender, apparently healthy, and righteous wore their masks in the EWR terminal and then while walking onto our EWR-LIS flight:

All of my nail-biting was pointless. The flight was showing on time when we rushed to the gate to find… no Boeing 787. Flightaware showed that the plane had landed two days earlier. Where was the plane? “They’re bringing it over from the hangar,” said a United employee. “I don’t know why they didn’t do it earlier.” After everyone was boarded we couldn’t close the door because the in-flight entertainment system wasn’t working properly. We departed more than two hours late and, thus, could have enjoyed a relaxed dinner if the delays hadn’t been piecemeal.

The Lisbon airport is so close to downtown that Uber Black is only about $30. More comfortable than a tuktuk anyway:

We stayed at the Altis Prime apartment hotel in Principe Real. This is walking distance from the tourist Baixa while quieter and more convenient for doing business. The hotel is around the corner from a synagogue so, literally within hours after we arrived, the kids got to see a Free Palestine march:

(Only about 50 out of Greater Lisbon’s 2.9 million residents chose to participate.)

After a bit of napping to recover from our United Basic Economy experience (Economy wouldn’t have been any better; by the time we booked there weren’t any decent clusters of four seats available and the premium seats were all sold out), we headed down to the Baixa (heart of downtown) and found a quiet pro-Ukraine gathering:

The next day we went to the natural history museum that is near our hotel and found this juxtaposition of an electron microscope up against a tile wall, which is an 800-year-old tradition in Portugal:

The museum is next to one of Lisbon’s three (at least) botanical gardens:

From the garden it is a quick walk to the Bairro Alto, a neighborhood just above the Baixa that is served by an elevator and a funicular:

I remembered the Time Out Market as being fun, but that was in September. In June it is mobbed to the point that there is nowhere to sit and also insufficiently air conditioned:

The obligatory panoramic:

Here’s the kind of thing that we’re getting from AI today:

I wonder if instead we could get robot stonework so that modern buildings could be ornate and beautiful:

A couple of the pedestrian-only streets of the Baixa. Note the elevator to the Bairro Alto in the background of one photo:

To be continued…